lemonlily wrote:If soil have a lot of bacteria, why do plants live with it? I know that everyting and everywhere has bacteria, but it is interesting that it doesn't do anything, really.
Humans have adapted to living around bacteria and fungi all over the place. But wind blows them away, water washes them away, we take baths and they rarely find ideal conditions to grow very much.
But imagine if you--like a tissue cultured plant part--were placed in a little box with clear sides. Inside the box, up to your knees, is a goopy wet soup of nutrients. You can eat it and live and grow. But if the conditions inside the clear box were not sterile, there would be fungi and bacteria in the goopy soup also, although you wouldn't be able to see them at first, and they would begin to grow too, and very fast. There is almost no air movement in the box, so no breeze to blow the fungi and bacteria away and no water flowing through the box to wash them away.
So there you are, up to your knees in nutritious soup, and you notice that the fungi and bacteria, which you couldn't see when you were placed into the box, have now grown enough so that you can see little specks of them. They love it inside the box because they have everything they need, things that they often
don't have outside the box like water, heat and food, and moreover, in the box they have all of these things all of the time, unlike their sad fungi and bacteria friends on the outside who often starve, get too cold or hot, or dry up and die or are forced to wait sometimes for very long times for better conditions.
Inside this luxurious box your new companions start to grow faster and faster, and there
you are having barely grown at all. The bacteria and fungi reproduce by the millions and begin to stick to your skin as they also begin to fill up the space around you. It might seem like you are surrounded by cute, fluffy, living cotton. But this soft cotton suspects that you might be as yummy as the nutrient soup and wants to eat you too. As they fill up every bit of space in the box except where you are, and then begin to eat you, you realize that it would have been a lot nicer if you had had the nutrient soup all to yourself instead of having to share it with these little creatures who turned out to be
not such nice little companions after all.
Steve
- By Intheswamp
- By Cheesy_sandwhich_45
That was an awesome explanation Steve!
- By wcrosman
- By andynorth
- By Panman