(CNN) You'd think all animals would need oxygen to live, right? Wrong.

Researchers just discovered a unique organism that doesn't need to breathe. Instead, the tiny parasite lives in salmon tissue and evolved so that it doesn't need oxygen to produce energy.

It's a brilliant simplification that proves, sometimes, less is more, said Stephen Atkinson, senior research associate at Oregon State University's Department of Microbiology.

Atkinson co-authored a paper on the groundbreaking, less than 10-celled Henneguya salminicola that appeared in the journal PNAS this week.

"When we think of 'animals,' we picture multicellular creatures that need oxygen to survive, unlike many single-celled organisms including protists and bacteria," he told CNN. "In our work, we have shown that there is at least one multicellular animal that does not have the genetic toolkit to use oxygen."

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