It's been known for nearly a century that swarms of single-celled organisms thrive by consuming chemicals from their environments and expelling methane gas as a byproduct. In 2024, researchers in the laboratory of Roland Hatzenpichler, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in Montana State University's College of Letters and Science, published the first-ever descriptions of methane-producing microbes outside the lineage Euryarchaeota, which—in a study published on the bioRxiv preprint server—they have confirmed to be ubiquitous in the environment.