Scoop up a handful of soil and an entire ecosystem fits in the palm of your hand. That precious clod may not be visible to the naked eye, but it is teeming with life. One gram of soil contains about a billion single-celled organisms, including tens of thousands of different species, and if you can pull out the fungal strands, they can stretch for hundreds of kilometers. They are essential for life on Earth, including you and me. Once they are all dead, we will soon follow suit.
they are dying
For a long time, bacteria, fungi, and other microbes were thought to be immune to extinct pathogens wreaking havoc on larger organisms. They are so abundant and reproduce so quickly that they were once thought to pose no threat. is probably declining sharply.
Colin Averill, ecologist at ETH Zurich, said:
When we think of biodiversity loss, we usually sweat the big stuff: plants, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. In total, there are probably 7.7 million animal species, about 80% of which are insects and other arthropods, including arachnids and crustaceans. However, there are at least 6 million species of terrestrial fungi and up to 1 trillion species of bacteria and archaea, known as prokaryotes. upon …
