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Q&A

Can mercury compounds be used in chemosynthesis?

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While watching Biblaridion's Alien Biosphere series, an interesting point came up: in Biblaridion's fictional world, atmospheric hydrogen sulfide is used as an energy source for chemosynthetic bacteria, drastically affecting the pathways that evolution takes on his world.

This got me thinking about chemosynthetic organisms using mercury sulfide. Something along the lines of this: sessile animals mining mercury sulfide, which appears in large veins in my planet, with microbes turning the elemental mercury back into mercury sulfide. The oceans are clouded black by photosynthetic bacteria using the mercury sulfide as a pigment.

Can organisms use the oxidation of mercury as an energy source to power chemosynthesis?

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/176115. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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