> Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know [...]

Citation needed.

> Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.

Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.

The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.

    > Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You
    > eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.

When an engineer walks in front of an idling jet engine you don't say the jet eats viruses.

To be more precise, viruses are just made up of proteins and DNA / RNA. Your normal digestion that can handle proteins and DNA/RNA from animals, plants etc doesn't have any more problem breaking down virus proteins into amino acids and absorbing them.

I think the OP was talking about the bacteria that derive non-negligible sustenance from viruses.

>Moreover, our foraging trials demonstrated robust growth in the Halteria population with only chloroviruses as food (rint = 0.66 ± 0.26 [SD], black lines, Fig. 1A), with minimal to no growth in the controls (with chloroviruses filtered out; rint = 0.22 ± 0.12 [SD], blue lines, Fig. 1C). The abundance of the larger Paramecium did not increase in treatment or control trials (Fig. 1D), indicating that not all ciliates can grow on chloroviruses in these conditions, even when they consume them.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2215000120

Yes, I know. That's why I wrote

>> Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.

> Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.

> The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.

You wrote it, but it was what we all understood already, making writing it nothing but an exercise in snark.

Not sure.

Eg creatures that eat plastic are still news, even if plastic is not their sole diet.

Yet, you are eating plastic every day.

Yes, but not digesting it.

> Citation needed

How could you possible find a citation for that? It’s not even pretending to be a scientific or totally objective claim. Asking for a citation for this type of statement is no way to have a discussion. Do you not see why?

Eh, 'Citation needed.' was my admittedly somewhat snarky way of calling bullshit.

Most any scientist will happily babble all about the stuff they don't know yet in their discipline, because that's exactly where the excitement lies for them.

Some do. Many don't.

Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their thesis look wrong.

> Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their graduate thesis look ill-conceived.

What makes you think so? What evidence do you have?

Have you read any of it?