Status Updates From Life in the Soil: A Guide f...

Eli

The humus that these creatures generate during the processes of decay is essential to fuel the processes of growth. Without humus, mineral nutrients from fertilizers are soon lost from the soil, along with the pore spaces that hold the moisture and the air that make a well- structured soil so productive and fertile.

I have to say the author's prose is impressive, while reading I'm able to visualize as if I was watching a documentary - the same as when a fiction author's writing is so good I visualize the book as a film

Part 3, things pick up again

Part 2 is the insect/animal reference

Part 3 is 'Working in Partnership with Creatures of the Soil'

Seems like a good reference.

If someone is an insect nerd this book may come across as oversimplified, I found it a nice refresher.

I'm too the part of the book where it's all about insects and now understand the top review - this isn't a book to be read all at once. The pace slows down when you get to the insects.

Investigators have now traced the fl ow of nutrients between roots and fungi. They have also shown that pine seedlings with mycorrhizae absorb more nitrogen, more potassium, and more than twice the phosphorus from the soil than do pine seedlings without fungal partners planted in the same soil. Fungi and plants
grow up together, sharing nutrients, but always respecting each other’s
integrity

Even though only about 130 species of endomycorrhizal fungi have been described, they are believed to form alliances with as many as 300,000
species of plants. These fungi are all in the phylum Zygomycota, order Glomales, and can grow only in association with plant roots.

The fungi of endomycorrhizae, or vesicular- arbuscular mycorrhizae, have hyphae that actually penetrate the walls of root cells but not the membranes of the cells

*I haven't

I have watched the documentary by VICE about sand mining yet, but this book has already put into perspective how devastating that could be to an environment

and just generally enriching the soil by intertwining their living filaments with the lifeless grains of sand and the solid crystals of rocks. But none of these pioneers has roots that can delve deep beneath the surface of the new soil. Hardy plants are drawn to these fragile sites, extending their roots and soon transforming the sites to green oases where other creatures can gain a foothold in the young soil.

Atop barren rocks and the sands of deserts one of the first signs of life is the formation of a thin, fragile crust, known among ecologists
as a cryptobiotic (crypto = hidden; bios = life) soil, that harbors bacteria,
lichens, algae, protozoa, some fungi, and some mosses (plate 3).These pioneers settle down in these sterile environments, adding nitrogen, storing water, stopping erosion,

What lichens have that other organisms do not is the ability to produce a variety of acids, many of which are found nowhere else in the kingdoms of life.

Lichens, of all creatures, are especially gifted
when it comes to breaking down rocks

lichen can live an awfully long time in one place on a rock—
a few hundred, even a few thousand years (plate 2). A lichen can afford to be unhurried and persistent in its aff airs. Third, lichens can penetrate and, after many generations, ultimately eat their way into their rocky homes.

Lichens and algae are usually the first obvious signs of life on barren, uninhabited surfaces of the earth.

The algal partner not only captures the energy of sunlight to produce sugars and oxygen but can also fix nitrogen from the air while the fungal partner provides water and essential elements for survival and growth.

Four very successful partnerships are (1) the algae and fungi that form lichens, (2) the plants and bacteria that form nitrogen- fixing root nodules, (3) the fungi and plants that form mycorrhizae, and (4) the diggers and decomposers that circulate and recycle
the soil nutrients that plants need for survival

Alliances between organisms have been very important, if not essential, in colonizing soils for the first time. By sharing their talents and working together, the partners survive where either one alone would have perished.

In the early years of the earth, lightning
was the only agent that could transform nitrogen of the air into nitrogen of nitrates. As life began to appear on earth, a few specialized bacteria, blue- green algae or cyanobacteria (cyano = dark blue; bacteria
= rod), and certain actinomycetes that live in the soil began to take on the task of converting dinitrogen gas to ammonia, a process known as nitrogen fixation.

very few of our fellow creatures can use nitrogen as it exists in the air—nor can we. Animals depend on plants and other animals as sources for their nitrogen; and the only forms of nitrogen that green plants can use are ammonia (formed by
combining nitrogen with hydrogen) and nitrates (formed by combining nitrogen with oxygen).

Mineral soils form from rocks, air, and water. These soils, however, are missing one fi nal element that is essential for the survival of all creatures. This element is nitrogen. Ironically, soil is surrounded by this element. Even though roughly three- fourths of the air we breathe is nitrogen in the form of dinitrogen gas (N2) and 34,500 tons of this gas lie over every acre of land,

By one liberal estimate, just an inch of soil takes on the order of 500 years to form; and by a more conservative estimate,
one inch of soil forms every 1,000 years.

represent combinations of soil particles with textures lying somewhere between any two of the three major types of soil texture: sand, silt, and clay.

The soil- forming forces are as effective now as they were when the earth was much younger. Soil is being born today just as it has been since the early years of the earth. But the birth of soil is a slow and labored process.