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Lake Retba in Senegal is one of several pink lakes in the world. It's even saltier than the dead sea, and many locals there work as salt harvesters.
The pink colour comes from harmless microbes living in the water, which use strongly coloured pigments as a kind of sunscreen. Some of them use a type of photosynthesis which may have evolved independently of plants.
(Image credit: VCG Photo)
Those microbes are quite interesting too. They're called haloarchaea, and they catch solar energy using a protein called bacterorhodopsin. It's made from retinal, one of the molecules which your eyes use.
Thing is, bacteriorhodopsin works *completely* differently to chlorophyll, and haloarchaea don't capture carbon dioxide like plants do. It's an entirely different kind of photosynthesis!
Convergent evolution is really cool. I love how nature finds multiple ways to do things.
@InvaderXan As a physicist you would *love* a talk I attended on bacterial chlorophyll, which is not the same as bacteriorhodopsin, and which incorporates in its function a number of wholly quantum effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteriochlorophyll
One of them was the arrangement of antenna proteins; each of the 12/16 or so antenna protein could absorb a photon polarised to within a few degrees, but the array could together absorb _any_ lateral polarity. The energy is then transferred _losslessly_ to the core.
@cathal I expect I probably would have! Photosynthesis is fascinating, and I don't know nearly enough about it!