As a non-scientist writing occasional pieces that sometimes involve a fair amount of science, I am acutely aware of the possibility of getting something wrong. Still, some things are just so intrinsically interesting that the effort must be made.
I love stories like the following one because they reveal the wonderful complexity of the connections that can be found even the simplest of things, and it don't get much simpler than a single-cell bacteria. Turn out these little guys have quite the social life.
Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have uncovered a mechanism used by bacteria to tell each other that food is there for the getting. The effectiveness of this process directly affects the amount of CO2 that is released by the ocean back into the atmosphere. That in turn affects all of us.
The ocean is filled with tiny plants (phytoplankton) that are eaten by tiny animals (zooplankton). Two things happen. The zooplankton poop out the digested phytoplankton back into the ocean. This zoop-poop is sticky, so it ... sticks together. In polite marine biology circles this is referred to as "marine snow."
All this zoop-poop inevitably attracts the attention of bacteria which can break down the zoop-poop into useful amino acids. They do this by producing enzymes. Thing is, it takes a bunch of bacteria to do the job properly. So when a blizzard of marine snow happens by, the nearby bacteria emit a chemical signal to see if there are any other bacteria around.
If there are enough bacteria buddies in the area to constitute a quorum, they go to work on the zoop-poop. If not, then the zoop-poop continues on down to the ocean floor. All this matters because zoop-poop is rich in carbon. So the activity of the bacteria in breaking up the zoop-poop has a direct affect on the amount of carbon gets sequestered and how much remains available for reuse.
To give you an idea of the scale of operations here, in 2005 scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey Bay Research Institute, and the National Geophysical Data Center reported a "milky sea" that had occurred a decade earlier. It was an aggregation of an estimated billion trillion bacteria cells that covered an area of 5,946 square miles in the Indian Ocean and glowed brightly enough to be seen by satellite.
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