In general, it's mind-blowing to travel back in Earth's history and realize there were tens or hundreds of millions of years where strategies that are commonplace today had never been tried before (or they'd tried too early and failed). It makes one wonder, what will be the strategies of future life which no creature has yet evolved? Can we even imagine it?
I think it's almost guaranteed that bacteria eating plastics will proliferate globally at some point, we've put so much of this stuff in the environment and it's just free energy ready to be consumed if your digestive system knows how.
I used to entertain this idea but I'm somewhat skeptical such a thing could proliferate, there is just not that much plastic relative to the other sources of energy an animal can evolve towards. I'd be interested to hear otherwise though.
it's also mind blowing to know that there are things which really haven't changed in over a billion years, yet still do just fine. How did my bio prof say it? "Bacteria are like the race cars of the biological world. They don't win by having the best strategy, they win by rate of duplication and acquisition."
