@calliandra Thank you , you have just added to my understanding . Much Respect .
View attachment 865473. now look at this , I was trying to tell my daughters boy friend how to deal with snakes , and bugger me as I went to grab it he pulled it by the tail . end result .
View attachment 865472
Cheers, tis my pleasure and helps remind me not to drink the koolaid too!
Very ouchy looking, that! I know nothing of snakes despite growing up in Brasil (and EVERYone had encounters except me? lol), hoping its a harmless one!!
well indeed if you have seen a depletion of P,and that explanation almost explains itself. not sure about where your at on Aussie Island. but here in the states from big agriculture,they ripped the land and life apart in many regions and depleted the type of life to shrive in the whole team players thing. its coming back well,but not everywhere. if if the region has been depleted from region big farming,that has an impact. and here in the states pretty much across the board you have to look and see (IF at all) you can add P to the soil since there is many times the supposed normal amounts.so its limited and injured soil(s) in many regions across the globe. so it can be a thing even in what seems like solid regions. you usually have to tend it ,and add things and build it up. which will solve the issue if the region(s) havent been too messed.
Just saying,its a possibilty. thats all.
thats a nasty hand ya got there dude.LOL his name Willie?! Willie Bite?!LOL
So true regarding whole regions wiped of microbial soil life!
And definitely some of the most challenging situations, because you have to bring that life back from outside the degraded area.
But it's being done too, Elaine Ingham has tons of examples getting the life back into large scale AG situations, with incredibly beautiful repercussions - on livestock health, regional ecology, even the weather.
Hope, deeply moving, right there!
But we do need to understand that the actual problem is not the absence of P, even in such dire situations, it's the lack of microbes to cycle P into plant-available forms. We can help restoration along by adding soluble nutrients too in the beginning (and it's done that way, slowly phasing out the synthetics as soil life slowly re-establishes itself) , but the
biology is the only thing that will stick (literally!) in the long run
I was talking about this last week with my old bio prof. There are many millions of microlife not categorized. I forget the actual estimate for a gram of soil, but it's close to 10 to 9th power microbes per gram. The way they we culture them is mostly on Agar plates, and they estimate about 1-5% can grow in the environment we give them. That leaves 10 to the 9th minus a few thousand left unknown.
They can however do DNA and RNA sequencing on what they find. This is how they get the big number for species richness. But without the ability to culture them independently in the lab, they ignore most of them untill it's easy. And till it fits within the 3 year grant cycles so the studies can be paid for.
I was turned down for several studies already because most of mine would take 5 to 10 years and require expensive DNA testing. There's also the problem of big Ag dictating school resources. There are many many good studies (like mine) that are all about saving the world, that never get traction due to politics and lobbying.
I started two raised bed hugelkulters a couple years ago hoping to get some grant for a microlife richness and diversity study using the hugelkulter technique. But it just costs so much to do the testing I gave up and am just going to have to be happy with my gardens without the study.
That's probably the most succinct representation of the problematics the scientific community is facing that I've ever read.
So true!
I was excited to discover DNA sequencing as a potentially more empirically reliable method to assess microbial
communities and understand their interactions
- hoping it would be more accepted than the morphological assessment methods Ingham developed many years ago with her professors (and I can understand why too, as I am learning that method myself and can see the pitfalls and reservations one may have about it). But yeah, I had the hunch it's probably hella expensive and not going to be widely accessible anytime soon -apart from the fact that there is all the discovering of which sequences typify which kinds of organisms to be done so that kind of analysis can even be made.
Using a light microscope with shadowing does allow us to roughly ascertain the presence of different trophic groups and thus draw conclusions as to the composition of the soil ecosystem. Sampling live microbial communities, dilution, slide preparation and identification all show variability that we can reduce with practice, but the resulting picture will still be more of a shadow theater of what's REALLY going on in the soil. OTOH, what isn't. all of what we know is basically theories, and even the most robust-seeming get overthrown time and again.
I am certain morphology-based assessment will be superceded by more informed techniques in time, but the the moment we can and do get a pretty good picture, especially over the time course, of how our communities are developing, and how they interrelate. That's how we know there is a succession in soil microbial communities to match with the succession of plants aboveground...
Sorry to read that your impetus has been thwarted by the situation - your ideas sound like just the kind of research we actually need to further our understanding!
And actually, I do think Inghams method could be a solution for your plight, allowing you insights otherwise not possible. it's relatively accessible to most anyone, and once you have that microscope, cost is nill too. Just that the scientific community doesn't really recognize this method as valid...
Cheers!
