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Temporarily store or permanently? What happens when fungi dies? It gets released back into atmosphere through breathing of whatever ate that fungi. Since total

by dvh 3y ago

Temporarily store or permanently? What happens when fungi dies? It gets released back into atmosphere through breathing of whatever ate that fungi. Since total mass of fungi is constant, they hold some amount of carbon permanently and regularly capture and release certain amount of carbon but overall amount of captured carbon is constant right? The only way to permanently store carbon is in ocean floor sediments or in some anoxic environment.

seper8 3y ago
how about wood used for construction...
cubefox 3y ago
Or in the Carboniferous, where wood was first invented, but no organisms were around to digest it, so it accumulated in the form of coal.
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  Isn’t this absence of ligninase theory generally considered incorrect? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
  - scotty79 3y ago
    This article itself states that this is the widely accepted explanation before attempting to question it: "A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated." So this theory is generally considered correct with some people thinking it might not be.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      Yes, that paper is not very convincing. Because we know for sure that more plants have been fossilized without being decomposed, it is certain that either the plants were growing faster or after death they were decomposed slower or there were some phenomena that caused the frequent burial of the dead plants before being decomposed. The last cause is implausible as an explanation for something that had a duration of more than one hundred million years and which never happened later. Maybe the plants were growing faster, due to a higher content of carbon dioxide in the air, but that is not enough for a quantitative explanation, especially because if efficient decomposers had existed, their population size would have increased to match the available food. The decomposition must also have been much slower than today. So there is little doubt that the wood was decomposed much slower than today. What is much less certain, and this is the only part of this research paper that may be correct, is that lignin was the culprit. Perhaps the fungi of Carboniferous and Permian already had all the digestive enzymes of today, but all of them were less optimized than the modern enzymes, so the wood decomposition speed was lower than today.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
The paper discusses they don’t know the life cycle of the co2 but that it’s complex. They enumerate a number of exits, including the soil itself, and release as gas is one. Given that its probably reasonable to assume a fraction of carbon taken in is put back out. Their essential thesis is maintaining soil health globally is important. This seems kinda non controversial but they’re adding another weight to the calculus.

by dvh 3y ago

seper8 3y ago

how about wood used for construction...

cubefox 3y ago

Or in the Carboniferous, where wood was first invented, but no organisms were around to digest it, so it accumulated in the form of coal.

TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
Isn’t this absence of ligninase theory generally considered incorrect? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4780611/
- scotty79 3y ago
  This article itself states that this is the widely accepted explanation before attempting to question it: "A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated." So this theory is generally considered correct with some people thinking it might not be.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Yes, that paper is not very convincing. Because we know for sure that more plants have been fossilized without being decomposed, it is certain that either the plants were growing faster or after death they were decomposed slower or there were some phenomena that caused the frequent burial of the dead plants before being decomposed. The last cause is implausible as an explanation for something that had a duration of more than one hundred million years and which never happened later. Maybe the plants were growing faster, due to a higher content of carbon dioxide in the air, but that is not enough for a quantitative explanation, especially because if efficient decomposers had existed, their population size would have increased to match the available food. The decomposition must also have been much slower than today. So there is little doubt that the wood was decomposed much slower than today. What is much less certain, and this is the only part of this research paper that may be correct, is that lignin was the culprit. Perhaps the fungi of Carboniferous and Permian already had all the digestive enzymes of today, but all of them were less optimized than the modern enzymes, so the wood decomposition speed was lower than today.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

The paper discusses they don’t know the life cycle of the co2 but that it’s complex. They enumerate a number of exits, including the soil itself, and release as gas is one. Given that its probably reasonable to assume a fraction of carbon taken in is put back out. Their essential thesis is maintaining soil health globally is important. This seems kinda non controversial but they’re adding another weight to the calculus.