"[Melanin] doesn't reflect any light; it's all going into it. Is it all disappearing into a black pigment and has no use whatsoever? Biology is incredibly inventive," Casadevall argues. After all, extremophile microbes thrive in the heat and acid of hydrothermal vents below the sea or live off the radiation of decaying radioactive rocks deep inside Earth's crust. "It's not that outlandish," Casadevall says, for fungi to harvest the energy in ionizing radiation with the help of melanin. But it is unexpected and strange.

2 Comments

1. 1. comagua2000 05:12 PM 12/10/08

   The melanin is to animal kingdom, like chlororpyll is to vegetable kingdom, both dissociate water molecule.

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2. 2. dragonoake 02:15 AM 3/21/12

   I was thinking .....
   Since ionizing radiation seems the simplest way to produce complex pre-biotic chemistry from clouds of dust, would it not be possible that earliest life forms could have evolved in a similar environment?
   Perhaps an organism utilizing melanin as a method of harvesting environmental energy could have arisen, which would later have evolved into one that used chlorophyll as it adapted to changes in its environment, much as Hemoglobin replaced Hemocyanin as marine organisms moved onto dry land

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