 Who's missing? Who was not invited to the cladogram party? Well, the viruses. Viruses are crazy cool. However, why aren't they included on our cladogram? It's kind of a sad story. Nobody thinks they're alive. So they're not actually considered cells, so they're not included. But let me tell you a little bit about them. First of all, holy tiny. Viruses are like the tiniest critter that isn't a critter that we find. And I'm going to draw you a picture of a, I don't know, this is like the quintessential virus, but I'm going to show you some other pictures because they come in different flavors. But this is truly like, this is what they look like. This particular virus that I'm drawing right here, this is what it looks like, a little spaceship, uh-huh. And it contains DNA. However, it's not a cell, so it doesn't contain the organelles or the machinery to actually carry out DNA synthesis. It can't replicate itself by itself. You might argue what a brilliant setup, like it's this tiny super mobile, they can go anywhere, they can live anywhere. And then all it has to do is find a cell that it can hijack and it will squirt its DNA or RNA, they can contain RNA as well. It'll squirt its genetic material into the cell that it is infecting and its little protein coat stays outside and now there's DNA or RNA, some sort of genetic material floating around in the cell. The cell is like, successful viruses have DNA chunks that the cell is like, oh, look, who sent this DNA in here? Let's make it into a protein, which usually is in a great strategy. However, the cell has all the machinery necessary. The cell has the ribosomes, the cell has the endoplasmic reticulum, the cell can totally like bust a move and make proteins. And guess what this DNA codes for? Again, brilliant strategy. The DNA codes for the building of like a little army of baby viruses. And so your cell suddenly is hijacked by this DNA that the virus squirted in and begins to madly build a virus army. And pretty soon the cell is like, whoa, there's like a million baby viruses in here and watch this, this is what happens. It's an explosion, like that, and then guess who leaves? Bye-bye. Thank you very much, Mr. Cell. We're very happy now to invade the rest of your body and out go the viruses to go infect someone else. Seriously, fantastic strategy. Like I said, there are many different kinds of viruses and different ways that they attack and different ways that they do their jobs, but really they're these fantastically sophisticated parasites that hijack eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells. This is a visual of a prokaryotic cell being invaded by viruses. These are all the viruses on the outside. This is the actual picture of the virus. And check it out, like we've got really awesome microscope graph images of the real thing in action. Like they're not messing around, you guys. However, I told you that they were really tiny. I want you to look at this graph because they did a survey of ocean, ocean water. And look at this. When they looked at, the viruses are indicated by blue. When they looked at the biomass of critters in the ocean, like how much do these critters actually weigh? They just looked at prokaryotes and protists, which are single cell eukaryotes, and viruses. And they found that, you know, of course, viruses are tiny. So they didn't weigh very much. About the mass of the protists that are around and clearly there's way more prokaryotes in the ocean, biomass wise, like how much all of these things weigh. However, when they counted up numbers, look at what happened. There's a tiny sliver of protists in the ocean, single cell eukaryotes. There's a decent size sliver of prokaryotes when you just are thinking numbers and then what? Look at how many viruses are in the ocean. That's unbelievable, but there's that many, but they weigh that much. So hopefully that gives you an idea of the size of a virus. These guys are not big. Remind yourselves, why were they not included on our cladogram? Because they're not actually considered life. They're not alive, they're not cells, so they don't get counted. This is something that is definitely a debatable concept. You're welcome to chime in your opinion. I'd love to know. And the next thing we're going to look at is the bacteria. Oops, there.