"Wee Beasties" and other "Critters" in TP

[Michaelangelica]

You know I just remembered that years a go, when I found my self going to a few Rose Society meetings, the top old rose growers, the old ones who won all the prizes told me something.
They all would only use cow manure and rain water on their roses.

So what 'wee beastie' do roses like (or vice versa); that is in cow manure (or encouraged by it) and is sensitive to chlorine in tap water?

[Michaelangelica]

Bog may hold climate change clues
Reuters
By Michael Kahn Reuters - Wednesday, September 19 07:36 pm

LONDON (Reuters) - An ancient bog that pumped out high amounts of greenhouse gases during a period of global warming 55 million years ago may offer clues about future climate change, researchers said on Wednesday.
. . .

The researchers looked at molecular fossils that came from bacteria and found that as temperatures rose, the organisms switched to a diet of methane -- probably because there was more of it around, Pancost said.

"Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas," he said. "So if the processes at (the bog) were widespread, then the increase in methane emissions could have caused further warming, amplifying the climate change at this time."

The bog became part of a vicious cycle -- warmer temperatures caused higher emissions of methane, which drove temperatures even higher, he said.

"The main event made it warmer and wetter," Pancost said. "What we are talking about is a response to the system."

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Nature, cautioned that the data was only from a single site but said it nevertheless shows how some ecosystems might respond to rapid climate change in the future.

[Michaelangelica]

Richard Lankau and Sharon Strauss grew monocultures of two genetic variants of an annual plant called black mustard, and also a mixture of three species.

One of the black mustard varieties produced high levels of a compound called sinigrin, which is toxic to other plants and to beneficial soil micro-organisms, the other produced low levels.

The researchers then introduced a “foreign” individual into each of these experimental communities:

• a low sinigrin plant into the high sinigrin monoculture and the mixture,
• a high sinigrin plant into the low sinigrin monoculture and the mixture,
• and a plant of a different species into the monocultures and the mixture.

Which would survive?

It turned out that the high sinigrin invader only survived in the mixture, while the low sinigrin variety only survived in the high sinigrin monoculture.
. . .

Preventing the erosion of genetic diversity within species may require maintaining a diversity of species in a community.
At the same time, we may need to focus on protecting high levels of genetic diversity within species in order to maintain diverse communities of species.

http://agro.biodiver.se/2007/09/main...an-experiment/

[CerebralEcstasy]

Thank you for these very interesting and informative articles.

[Michaelangelica]

Thanks CE
this is the transcript from an ABC radio show. Not really on soil bugs but. .
You can listen to the show for the next few weeks or just read the transcript

Anyway Giselle, what's your ambit; what beasties do you include in your swag of little things?

Giselle Walker: There are creatures which don't have cells,

• which are viruses
• and there are reproducing molecules that don't have cells, which are prions, but they're fairly easy to distinguish from things that
• are cellular which include bacteria, eukaryotes and archaea.

So archaea basically look like bacteria but they live in weird places and they run on weird chemistry.
Bacteria are the things that everyone's familiar with, things like E. coli and staph aureus.
Eukaryotes we're all familiar with but people probably don't realise what they are; they're cells that have their DNA stuffed inside a nucleus.

Robyn Williams: That's us, isn't it?

Giselle Walker: That's us, that's plants, algae, protozoa and slime moulds and about 95% of the eukaryotes are single celled which points out that animals in general are a tiny, tiny blip of diversity both in terms of abundance and in terms of cellular diversity or genetic diversity.
And so what I work on is basically the rest of the eukaryotes, minus the plants and minus the fungi because there again, they're a bit big for me to look at.
. . .
. . .
Robyn Williams: It's interesting. Now when it comes to becoming multicellular, I'm always fascinated by that creature called the slime mould, in fact Dictyostelium is one of my favourites, which goes around as a bunch of unicells in the earth and then somehow a signal comes and they all get together and they form a slug-like object with a back and a front end, almost like a snail and go off and reproduce. I mean is that the kind of beginning of multicellularism where it's optional or is that a weird off shoot?

Giselle Walker: Interestingly that has happened in a whole bunch of different groups. You can divide the eukaryotes up into six major groups.

• One group includes the animals and fungi;
• another group includes amoebae and things like Dictyostelium.
• Another group includes plants and red algae;
• another group includes weird stuff like Giardia

and in this group that contains weird stuff like Giardia is the organism that I work on, which also does slime mould morphology. It's called Acrasis rosea and so it crawls around as a set of amoebae in the earth most of the time and then occasionally when you have a particular pattern of dark-light cycles it decides to make a little tree and some spores and disperse. And you can induce this in the lab
. . .
In terms of us versus these squillion other things living in our guts, yes, there are a lot.
I tend to work on the things that live in termite guts rather than in our guts, so I'm looking at convergent evolution in termite flagellates which are the things that termites use to digest their cellulose.
So these little unicells that live inside the guts of termites seem to have relatively similar morphologies no matter which set of termites they live in or indeed if they live in a cockroach.
And this appears to be something to do with the physical constraints of living inside a cockroach or a termite rather than actually being to do with the relationships between these different organisms
. . .
. . .
So something I'm doing at the moment is looking at convergence of these different hydrogenosomes and trying to characterise the organelles in one particular type in an organism called Breviata anathema, which I studied during my PhD.

Robyn Williams: Anathema.

Giselle Walker: Anathema. There is a time honoured tradition in taxonomy of trying to get silly names into the literature. I'm definitely not the best exponent of it but the lab I was in in Sydney was known for this and so anathema was my best effort so far. There have been many other taxa like fornicata and Massisteria marina and Euglena viagra, which is also quite a good one.

Robyn Williams: Mike Archer got I think Montypythonoides turned down at one stage for some weird fossil.

[Michaelangelica]

The researchers traced the path of the carbon by replacing the normal carbon dioxide in the air around the plants with a version made with C-13, a natural, non-radioactive form of carbon that is slightly heavier than the usual kind. Within hours, microbes in the roots were feeding on sugars laden with C-13 and using it to build their own cells.

The newly-made molecules of DNA and RNA produced by the microbes could be separated from pre-existing ones because the C13 made them heavier. DNA and RNA are large molecules that carry genetic information about the organisms that made them, so it was possible to identify the microbes that made those heavy molecules. These were the ‘greedy’ ones that were consuming the largest share of the sugars provided by the plant.

Professor Young said: "There are rich communities of microbes growing in or around the roots of all plants growing in normal soil. Most do no harm to the plant, and some are very beneficial to it. We looked at two sorts of microbe: bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi."

The researchers found a high diversity of both types of microbe inside the roots of grass or clover plants growing in a pasture, but the ‘heavy’ label revealed that some of these were growing much more actively than others.

Professor Young added: "It is these active organisms that are important because they are turning sugar back into carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere. We were astonished at the wide variety of active bacteria that we discovered. Many of them had not been seen in plant roots before, and we have no idea how they may affect plant growth."

The role of mycorrhizal fungi is better known.

Hungry Microbes Share Out The Carbon In The Roots Of Plants
Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Use one of the following formats:
APA

MLA
University of York (2007, October 21). Hungry Microbes Share Out The Carbon In The Roots Of Plants. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 3, 2007, from http://www.sciencedaily.com* /releases/2007/10/071018123523.htm

[erich]

From Michael's Posting on the TP Bioenergy List;

"Classifying, naming, describing, all soil micro flora/fauna in all climes is probably beyond anyone's reach. Apart from the difficulty of growing soil micro flora in lab conditions.
Their dynamic interactions with each other and plants are only poorly understood
We would need a NASA type budget even to have a chance of discovering what life lives under our feet on this planet.
SEE
We need a trillion more indoor plants.
for more discussion and posts about this very important aspect of Terra preta

We still don't know if it is a unique suite of Amazonian micro-organisms that make TP work as well as it does there. "



To this end I have been researching Metagenomic work with soils. Way over my head, sending emails to convince these guys to support a Metagenomic Project for Terra Preta Soil Technology.

I sent off my TP post & links to all the contacts on the soils studies on this list ;
http://www.genomesonline.org/gold.cgi?want=Metagenomes






Charles Mann, in the May issue of National Geographic, reminds us of the Columbian Exchange's profound reuniting of life on earth. Earth & Blood worms as invasive species?! ...WOW.

Our agriculture has already stirred the weebeastie pot, and over 10,000 years pumped a majority of GHG
to the atmosphere.

Carbon back to the soils is the only road home.

All of us thrive with good infrastructure, char goes way beyond the old saw of "Feed the soil not the plant" to feeding, clothing, housing, transport, utilities and health care to the soil.

The small steps being taken now by many diverse folks on the list, academia, and private sector to develop protocols should show us if there will be any runaway problems with opportunistic bugs or fungi in building these soil communities.

We have been groping in the microbial dark for a very long time, now with tools like Metagenomics, we will see the light of our symbiotic relationships with weebeasties in our health as well as our soils.



P. S.
Yesterday I was contacted by a journalist for the New York Times, wanting to do a carbon to the soil story. She was crest fallen when I told her that SCIAM did a Terra Preta article in May, she wanted an exclusive. I sent her all my links and she will be pitching the story to her editor for a full assignment. I comforted her by saying that no major paper had done a TP story and that hardly anyone but academics read Nature and SCIAM.

CROSS YOUR FINGERS.........This could start balls rolling.........NYT; Circulation 1,120,420 Daily
1,627,062 Sunday




Erich J. Knight
Shenandoah Gardens
1047 Dave Berry Rd.
McGaheysville, VA. 22840
(540) 289-9750
shengar@aol.com

[Michaelangelica]

Understanding Compost Tea

Soil Foodweb Inc. about us

ATTRA - National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service: organic farming, sustainable ag, publications, newsletters

[Michaelangelica]

SEE
Recovering degraded soils
from "trees & water" thread

Let’s summarize the play by naming and rewarding the main actors and actresses (not all of them, a too long list):

Seeds:
Brachiaria brizantha cv. marandu, Albizia guachapele, Digitaria
swazilandensis, Canavalia ensiformis, Mucuna deeringiana, Crotalaria juncea,
Cajanus cajan, Stilozobium aterrimum, Leucaena leucocephala, Gliricidia
sepium, Acacia mangium, Erythrina verna, Goldmania paraguensis, Mimosa
caesalapinefolia, Senna siamea, Andropogon gayanus, Setaria sphacelata
cv. Kazungula

The main cast - microorganisms (“And the Oscar goes to...”):
N2 fixing: Rhizobium spp and a dozen others specific Rhizobia
inoculum.
Mycorryzal fungii: Glomus clarum - Gigaspora margarita

Best Supporting Actors:
Trichoderma spp ; EM4 (these are 71 different guys dividing one only
statuette)

The Theater: Your small but very efficient NURSERY.

[erich]

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