Biogeosciences

GeoTalk: meet Kara Müller, researcher of biodegradable plastic!

Simon Clark July 17, 2024

Kara Müller

Hello Kara. Thank you for joining this edition of GeoTalk! Could you tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your background? Thank you, Simon. I am excited to join you for the interview. I grew up in the middle of Germany in Bad Homburg, close to Frankfurt. After school, I travelled through Australia with occasional jobs, and after one year, I decided to return to Germany to study chemis ...[Read More]

Ocean hypoxia: what does the increase of dead zones mean for marine life?

Asmae Ourkiya July 12, 2024

When runoff from farmland and urban areas enters our streams and rivers, it carries a heavy load of fertilizers and nutrients. These substances accumulate and flow into our coastal oceans, triggering a series of reactions that can create hypoxic ‘dead zones’. Dead zones are low-oxygen, or hypoxic, areas in the world’s oceans and lakes. Because most organisms need oxygen to live, very f ...[Read More]

Predators or gardeners: how penguins fertilise Antarctica’s biodiversity

Anna Katsigera April 19, 2024

Sea birds contribute importantly to biogeochemical cycles in coastal ecosystems and on islands. Feeding on the marine food chain and nesting on land, they carry large amounts of marine nutrients into terrestrial ecosystems. This might be of particular importance for the nitrogen (N) cycle of terrestrial ecosystems in the antarctic. Credit: Daniel Wasner (distributed via imaggeo.egu.eu)

On the desolate Antarctic peninsula, a colony of penguins creates a hub of biodiversity. One may ask, how exactly do those aquatic birds help maintain and enrich the variety of different kinds of organisms from plants and animals, to a wide range of insects and micro-organisms that live on our planet? The answer is quite intriguing. Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China ...[Read More]

Soil bacteria that hunt like a wolfpack? Myxobacteria and their role in the food web

Maria Scheel April 16, 2024

A photo of a wolf in the middle and four microscopic images of colourful bacterial cultures around it.

Fig. 1 The resemblance between bacteria and a hunting wolf might not be obvious, but come take a dive into the weird ecology of Myxobacteria (Collage with photo credit Garcia et al. 2010 and Julien Riedel via pexels.com).

Picture this: bacteria that can slime their way around the soil, finding their prey, circling it, closing in on it and lysing it (or making their cell pop), just to feed on their prey. It sounds like a far stretch from a wolf to a bacteria, but even other soil predators, the comparably huge nematode worms ( up to 100 times bigger!), are afraid of these bacterial “wolves”. I went to the Soil System ...[Read More]