Fellow bloggers,
This is the fun and entertaining Michael writing this article for the week about biodiversity. But first, let's talk about the experiment and the procedure that occurred. The overall purpose was to assess the number of cultural microbes that were in the soil sample that we collected. Last week, our blog post discussed our soil sample site and the characteristics of it, and now we have our data from it! So, after our soil sample was taken, we had to turn the sample into a pure culture so we could estimate the number of microbes that were in the sample. We used proper and sterile techniques to get our soil sample into the different medias so it could grow.
The first topic I will talk about is the estimated amount of microbes that were in the soil sample that we dug up. Through the different dilutions petri dishes that we completed in lab, we analyzed and counted the number of colonies on each plate. Our estimated number of microbes in our soil sample was 83,000 microbes/ g of soil. This number absolutely blew my mind!!! Just a tiny amount of soil, and there were that many microbes, and think about how many grams of soil are just located on a football field...... MIND BLOWN! It's just something that you don't tend to think about.
Next, there was plenty of evidence of biodiversity located in our soil samples ( I'm dumb and can't figure out how to upload pictures), but when I figure that out then I will have living proof!!! We had multiple kinds of bacteria grow on our plates as well as a big, huge, ginormous fungi grow in one of our plates, and it was amazing to see something like that grow in just 24 hours. The colors of our bacteria also varied between light shades of yellow (white-ish) and very dark shades of yellow. The texture of colonies also varied between a glossy look to a very dull appearance. Some of the bacteria were rounded, while some were very flat.
So why is biodiversity in our soil important? Soil biodiversity is important due to the variety of organisms that live in that environment, and some of these organisms you can't see. These diverse group of organisms interact with each other on a daily basis, and can provide symbiotic relationships which benefit multiple organisms. The biodiversity contributes to a wide range of services that are vital to keep an environment functional. Some of these functions include nutrient cycling, water regimes, regulating the dynamics of soil organic matter and many more processes. Without biodiversity in the soil, many of the living organisms that are relevant to ecological processes would not be able to function without receiving the proper nutrients and processes that allow a copious amount of organisms to survive.
The fun Michael in the M&M Blog,
Over and Out!
Sources: http://www.fao.org/nr/land/sustainable-land-management/soil-biodiversity/en/
