4 ms·
Original paper: > "Here, we show that the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica excretes sugars, mainly sucrose, into its rhizosphere. These sugars accumulate to µM con
by photochemsyn 4y ago
Original paper:
> "Here, we show that the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica excretes sugars, mainly sucrose, into its rhizosphere. These sugars accumulate to µM concentrations—nearly 80 times higher than previously observed in marine environments. This finding is unexpected as sugars are readily consumed by microorganisms. Our experiments indicated that under low oxygen conditions, phenolic compounds from P. oceanica inhibited microbial consumption of sucrose."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01740-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01740-z
A sugar like glucose is ~180 grams/mol. A µM concentration of glucose is going to be less than a milligram of sugar per liter of ocean water. In contrast, a liter of Coke contains ~120 grams of sugar (~ 0.6 M).
It's kind of interesting because the seagrass appears to be feeding sugar to bacteria, which might be doing nitrogen fixation in return, but it's hardly 'mountains of sugar'.
- dwighttk 4y agoThe ocean is big though. I think the headline writer was imagining the piles of sugar if you pulled it all out of the water and stacked it up.
- BoiledCabbage 4y agoI mean with that logic, there are mountains of lint in people's pockets. And mountains of cobwebs in their basements. Just about everything forms a mountain if you combine all instances of it in the world into a big pile. If anything, it'd only be notable if something didn't form a mountain when piled.
- dwighttk 4y agoImagine if lint was a well known food for bacteria and all the sudden it might be notable if bacteria were leaving it alone in pockets
- umvi 4y agoIt's notable because it's free energy that isn't being consumed for some reason. Sprinkle some sugar on the ground outside and ants will swoop in and grab it in minutes.
- justinclift 4y ago> ants will swoop in and grab it in minutes. That's not universally true. Saying that because I've personally accidentally dropped a 1kg bag of white sugar on the ground outside years ago which split open. I just left the sugar there, figuring ants would clean it up. Nope. Nothing touched it for around a week, until it rained, at which point it went away. Maybe the ants had a glucose syrup snack instead. ;)
- patall 4y agoAre you Dutch? 1g of lint per human is ~8,000 tons, which at 4g/cm3 is a cube of ~14m. Mountains are huge ;)
- hoseja 4y agoSeagrass only grows in the shallows.
- dwighttk 4y agoNot as big, but still pretty big.
- aristophenes 4y agoYes, and the carbon storage of all the seagrass sugar in the world is roughly equivalent to one day of automobile driving in the USA. But everywhere in the article it is phrased to make it appear like a world changing amount of carbon. Why?
- montalbano 4y agoI think the point of the article is that understanding how seagrass captures carbon is useful and interesting. For more relevant numbers, I did a very quick calculation (tell me if you spot a mistake). Using these numbers [0, 1], the worlds seagrass captures ~5% of US automobile emissions per year. Another number of interest, the amount of seagrass carbon sequestration is 2 - 4x greater than mature tropical rainforests (per hectare) [0]. Seems to me that seagrass is an organism worth understanding. [0] https://www.thebluecarboninitiative.org/about-blue-carbon https://www.thebluecarboninitiative.org/about-blue-carbon [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120499/us-road-vehicle-ghg-emissions-by-vehicle-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120499/us-road-vehicle-...
- wolfram74 4y agoIt's my understanding that early steam engines were pretty rubbish until the underlying thermodynamics were understood and then you could engineer your way to a Watt Engine [0] that was revolutionary. The nearly two order of magnitude superiority of this sea grass on this metric is tantalizing. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
- i386 4y ago> I think the point of the article is that understanding how seagrass captures carbon is useful and interesting. You’ve perfectly described why pure research science has merit in its own right. Application of knowledge comes a little later.
- divbzero 4y agoFor alternative points of reference, ~120 g of sugar is ~140 mL or ~0.60 US cups.