Date: May 9, 2019
Source: Cell Press
Scientists
have found that on the desolate Antarctic peninsula, nitrogen-rich poop from
colonies of penguins and seals enriches the soil so well that it helps create
biodiversity hotspots throughout the region. Their work, appearing May 9 in the
journal Current Biology, finds that the influence of this excrement can
extend more than 1,000 meters beyond the colony.
Researchers
braved the wicked cold of the Antarctic and maneuvered through fields of animal
waste and groups of clamoring elephant seals, gentoo, chinstrap, and Adélie
penguins to examine the soils and plants surrounding these colonies. "What
we see is that the poo produced by seals and penguins partly evaporates as
ammonia," says Stef Bokhorst, a researcher in the Department of Ecological
Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. "Then, the ammonia gets picked
up by the wind and is blown inland, and this makes its way into the soil and
provides the nitrogen that primary producers need in order to survive in this
landscape."
In fact,
this process allows ammonia to enrich an area up to 240 times the size of the
colony. And the results of this enrichment: a thriving community of mosses and
lichens, which in turn supports an incredible number of small invertebrates,
like springtails and mites. "You can find millions of them per square
meter here, but in grasslands in the US or Europe, there are only about 50,000
to 100,000 per square meter," says Bokhorst. "It took months and
months of sitting in the lab counting and IDing them under a microscope,"
he says, and he notes that trekking through the bitter temperatures of the
Antarctic was far preferable to that task.
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