
‘Electric mud’ teems with new, mysterious bacteria - bookofjoe
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/electric-mud-teems-new-mysterious-bacteria
======
sradman
Who knew. Cable bacteria [1]:

> ...are filamentous bacteria that conduct electricity across distances over 1
> cm in sediment and groundwater aquifers. Cable bacteria allow for long
> distance electron transport, which connects electron donors to electron
> acceptors, connecting previously separated oxidation and reduction
> reactions.

Cable bacteria and bacterial nanowires [2] seem to form linear bacterial
colonies [3] that conduct electrons.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_bacteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_bacteria)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_nanowires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_nanowires)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(biology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_\(biology\))

~~~
joshspankit
It’s discoveries like this that cement my belief that we fundamentally don’t
know the actual effects when we decide that we’re being “safe enough” for the
planet.

~~~
dmix
I came to the opposite conclusion, very often it's amazing how adaptable and
resilient the biological world can be.

~~~
fit2rule
Yeah, but nevertheless .. I'm still gonna be headed to space when the day
comes that we can 'just grow your CPU' in the bathtub...

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markrages
'Electric mud' was Muddy Waters' 1968 attempt to create a psychedelic record
to connect with the youth of the day. He did not even play guitar on the
record.

Despite the sneering of blues traditionalists, it is a great record.

~~~
kpgraham
I saw the title and thought that it was about Muddy Waters and was
disappointed when I clicked through. BTW. The Electric Mud album was recorded
using Muddy's regular band and then the psychedelic tracks were remixed in. If
you listen carefully you can hear Pinetop Perkins, Willy Smith and the rest of
the band. I remember hearing a remastered version without the psychedelic
tracks and it was much better.

~~~
c00ls0sa
Surely you weren't actually disappointed this was about electron conductive
bacteria as opposed to the psychedelic folk album?

~~~
kpgraham
I am a blues guy. Sure, electron conductive bacteria are cool, but not as cool
as Muddy singing "I've got my mojo working".

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prennert
The researchers used "[...] custom microsensors that detected changes in the
mud’s chemistry."

I have been toying with the idea of analysing the composition of soils for
house plants etc, but never had the time to actually dig deep enough to get
started working on it. My shallow searches for raspberry pi sensors was not
super succecssful (they do exist, but most projects seem old and abandoned)

Are there any affordable sensors out there that can be used to analyse soil
samples? Alternatively, what knowledge is required to build sensors that can
detect chemical composition of soil?

~~~
thatcat
There are a few sensors, see meter group for a professional selection, but
soil analysis requires sampling and wet lab work to determine composition.

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JoeAltmaier
Bacteria forming macro scale structures in nearly every wet ecosystem studied.
Perhaps we need new definitions for 'organism'.

~~~
taneq
Our innate fixation on categorizing everything has given us strange blind
spots all over the place. Take the whole thing with plants in a rain forest
communicating via chemicals and intermediate fungii and all sorts of things -
we insist on thinking of them as separate organisms mutely battling each
other, or (hippie hat firmly in place) as a single cohesive whole living in
harmony.

In reality it's neither, it's a disparate bunch of organisms in a complicated
web of iterated cooperation and defection in a cutthroat battle for individual
(and therefore often communal) survival.

~~~
meowface
What if we look at it from the other side, too? How much competition and
individual optimization is going on among the cells in the bodies and brains
of animals, including humans? I suppose one of the big differences is the
shared lineage and DNA, though I don't know how much that affects cooperation.

~~~
taneq
Exactly! We think ourselves as a single _thing_ but we're more like a
megalopolis inhabited mostly by bacteria with infrastructure provided by a
clone army.

Of course in our dystopian internal society any unsanctioned individuality is
quashed by the militarised police... unless of course it isn't at which point
it metastatizes and everyone dies.

(The question about shared DNA is really interesting - so much of our
individual drive for survival is a result of our K-strategist genetics and the
resultant selection pressures over the years. If we spawned like octopi or
grew from spores like orks, how much different would our worldview be?)

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pgtan
The Black Sea is rich on hydrogen sulfide. Googling on cable bacteria and
Black Sea showed this:

Cable bacteria can limit sulfide release by promoting iron oxide formation in
sediments.[1]

[...] we used laboratory incubations to assess whether cable bacteria can
establish in iron (Fe) monosulphide-poor coastal Black Sea sediment and to
determine the impact of their activity on the cycling of Fe, phosphorus (P)
and sulphur (S). [...] we show that the enrichments in Fe oxides induced by
cable bacteria are located in a thin subsurface layer of 0.3 mm. We show that
similar subsurface layers enriched in Fe and P are also observed at field
sites where cable bacteria were recently active and little bioturbation
occurs.[2]

[1]
[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01665#](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b01665#)

[2]
[https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2020-292/](https://bg.copernicus.org/preprints/bg-2020-292/)

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gerdesj
Very much worth a read:

“as if our own metabolic processes would have an effect 18 kilometers away,”

~~~
yetihehe
Yeah, but my metabolic processes sometimes do have an effect many kilometers
away.

It's like with ants, they can carry things many times their size, but if ant
was the size of an elephant and made with the same materials, it couldn't even
support itself.

~~~
taneq
> Yeah, but my metabolic processes sometimes do have an effect many kilometers
> away.

You mean like ordering pizza to be delivered?

~~~
bookofjoe
Winning!

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Ericson2314
This whole mud special issue is really quite good.

I remember many times in childhood being at the beach and trying to "help" the
stream reach the water. The end result was always a muddy mess. Lesson
learned, let the water meander.

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stevenicr
Wondering if this relates in any way to the bioluminescent soil 'discovered'
in TN during the civil war ( [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30380/why-
some-civil-war...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30380/why-some-civil-
war-soldiers-glowed-dark) ) If if the science used here can shed extra light
on it.

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jugg1es
This is fascinating. I was a bio major in college 2000-2004 and its awesome to
see how many things just weren't known back then.

~~~
dhosek
When I got my teaching credential in 2002–4, I had to do a few general
education requirements even though I already had a B.A., one of them was a
semester of biology. I'd taken two years of bio in high school in the 80s and
the difference in what was known in those two decades was astonishing.

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nickparker
I want somebody to isolate these, re-engineer them to respond to a control
input, and use them to implement nanowire network reservoir computing

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191226084403.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191226084403.htm)

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EmilioMartinez
>The discoveries are forcing researchers to rewrite textbooks

I see comments like this all too often. It makes it sound like textbooks were
not supposed to be updated anyways. I fear people expect science to "settle".

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x87678r
New mysterious bacteria in 2020? Put it back and leave it alone! Maybe next
year.

~~~
lima
Recent article about a discovery that's a few years old.

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meristem
Life is amazing.

