Scientists find the origin of herpes in the world's oceans
Scientists trawling through an immense volume of seawater believe they have found the evolutionary origin of the herpes virus.
Researchers found microbes that spread across the world's oceans that infect plankton.
The microbes have been named "Mirusviruses" - mirus being the Latin word for "strange".
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Mirusviruses are responsible for giving herpes to plankton. iStock
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Mirusviruses are a bizarre hybrid of two different lineages, but belong to the same group of viruses as the type of herpes that infect humans and other animals.
"This means that there is a shared evolutionary history between herpes, that infect only animals, and the mirusviruses that are everywhere in the ocean, where they infect unicellular organisms," French National Centre for Scientific Research's Tom Delmont told Live Science.
"All of this is pointing to a planktonic origin for herpes."
Plankton are tiny water creatures defined by their incapacity to swim against currents. Instead they spend their lives drifting through the water.
But while the mirusviruses pose a serious threat to the health of individual plankters, they are thought to be good for the overall ecosystem.
When plankters die, they release nutrients valuable for other ocean creatures to thrive.
The findings were first published in Nature.
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