Michał Słota

Master of disguise in the insect world 🔎🐛

DID YOU KNOW❓

💡 The common baron evolved into a master of camouflage:  feathery spines and yellow mid-dorsal stripes of its caterpillar mimic the mid-vein of a mango leaf. It increases its chances of avoiding predators until it reaches the butterfly stage.

🦋 Common Baron butterfly (Euthalia aconthea) is a common butterfly species native to Sri Lanka, India and Southeast Asia.

📚 Camouflage (or cryptic coloration) is a defense strategy that organisms use to disguise their appearance, usually to blend in with their surroundings.

🎯 Animals can employ several camouflage tactics:
-> background matching - strategy of resembling the surroundings in coloration, form, or movement,
-> disruptive coloration - a tactic where the identity and location of a species may be disguised through a coloration pattern,
-> mimicry - a phenomenon where an organism looks or acts like an object or another organism.

🏹 This allows prey to avoid predators, and for predators to effectively set upon prey.

🎬 Video: Common Baron butterfly on a mango leaf (credits: Jose Ramos Vivas).
#nature #biodiversity #biology

Soil exploration & dynamics of root hairs development 🔎🌱

📚 Root hairs are tubular extensions of root epidermal cells that play a crucial role in plant nutrient and water uptake.

⤵️ These structures significantly increase the root surface area, enhancing the plant's ability to explore and exploit the soil environment.

🌱 Soil conditions, including nutrient availability (P deficiency often stimulates root hair growth), pH, moisture content, and mechanical impedance, can affect root hair development.

🔎 In general, dicotyledonous plants tend to have higher root hair densities compared to monocotyledons (e.g. grasses).

🌾 Cereal crops like wheat and barley show moderate densities, usually ranging from 20 to 160 hairs per mm.

🥬 Brassica species typically have high root hair densities, often exceeding 200 hairs per mm of root length.

🫘 Legumes such as common bean and soybean can exhibit densities ranging from 100 to 250 hairs per mm.

Video: time-lapse footage of embryonic root development in cornflower (credits: Wim van Egmond 2024, video is part of the Soil Life in Action project).
#soil #biology #science

Phytohormones & minerals - A key to healthy crops 🔑👨‍🌾

🌱 Plant development is regulated by specific phytohormones, each of which plays a specific role in the growth and differentiation of plant tissues.

🧪 Macro- and microelements are important for the control of physiological processes, and their availability in given growth phases is crucial for proper growth and reproduction.

📌 Here is a brief summary of the relations between phytohormones and minerals in the following stages of plant development:

➡️ AUXINS
- Involved in the promotion of cell elongation and differentiation, and are crucial for plant growth and development.
- Play a role in apical dominance, the process by which the main stem of a plant grows more strongly than its lateral branches.
- Zinc (Zn) deficiency can result in reduced auxin levels and abnormal growth patterns.
- Boron (B) is required for the efficient transport of auxin

➡️ GIBBERELLINS
- Role in promoting stem elongation, seed germination, and fruit development.
- They regulate flowering and the transition from vegetative to reproductive growth.
- Manganese (Mn) deficiency can result in reduced gibberellin levels and stunted growth.

➡️ CYTOKININS
- Hormones that promote cell division and differentiation, and are important for the growth of lateral buds and shoot formation.
- Zinc (Zn) and Iron (Fe) are involved in the biosynthesis of cytokinins by activating the enzyme that converts cytokinin precursors into active cytokinins.

➡️ ABSCISIC ACID
- Regulates seed dormancy and helps plants to cope with environmental stresses such as drought and salinity.
- Molybdenum (Mo) deficiency can result in reduced abscisic acid levels and impaired stress tolerance.

➡️ ETHYLENE
- Promote fruit ripening and senescence, as well as the formation of adventitious roots and the response to mechanical stress.
- Iron (Fe) and Copper (Cu) deficiency can result in reduced ethylene levels and delayed fruit ripening.

📸 Image: summary of the role of specific phytohormones and minerals in successive stages of plant growth (based on Marschner's Mineral Nutrition of Plants 2022; illustrated by Content Farmers).

#biology #plants #agriculture #farming

Finding optimal tools for soil health assessment ⚖️🌱

📚 There is a common scientific consensus that soil quality needs to be evaluated by combining parameters that refer both to the physicochemical and the biological levels.

🛠️ An optimal soil quality assessment method should be characterized by:
- good flexibility,
- representation of the diversity of plant-microbiome relations & other biotic interactions,
- high sensitivity in order to detect changes in soil functions, management and climate effects,
- adequate comparability among sites.

🌾 Plant health indicators that correlate with soil characteristics include:
-> photosynthetic capacity,
-> availability of macro- and microelements,
-> exposure to soil pathogens,
-> stress resilience,
-> presence of pollutants.

🦠 Soil microbiomes can directly affect soil quality through their ability to release extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), that improve soil particle aggregation and help retain moisture. Microbiome activity has also a variety of positive indirect effects on soil health.

💡 The presence or absence of some specific bacterial taxa in the soil can determine the particular influence on nutrient availability and the beneficial effect on plant tolerance against biotic and abiotic stresses.

🔎 Specific microbial consortia can be applied in agricultural practice to facilitate nutrient cycling & unlock the yielding potential of crops. The balanced formulas including rich bacteria inoculants, such as those included in Asfertglobal's biofertilizer portfolio, have been demonstrated to improve the nutrient availability in the soil & naturally boost crop field performance.

📷 Image: plant health indicators as a proxy of soil quality (information source & credits: Giovannetti et al. 2023; DOI: 10.3389/fpls.2022.1082752).
#soil #agriculture #farming

World agricultural production in numbers 🚜🌎

DID YOU KNOW❓

🌾 Agricultural land is mostly dominated by cereals, with the production area of wheat, maize and rice cultivated on about 200 million ha globally each.

🚜 World agricultural land area is approximately five billion hectares (38 percent of the total land surface).

🐄 About one-third of this land is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures) for grazing livestock.

🌳 Within cropland, about 10 percent of the area is utilized for permanent crops, such as fruit trees, oil palm plantations and cocoa plantations.

👨‍🌾 Only around 2% of the world's agricultural land is farmed organically (practised in 191 countries with ca. 76 million ha in total).

Image: harvested area globally for certain crop types, average 2011-2021 (credits: Benjamin Nowak; data: FAOstats).
#farming #agriculture #crops

Microbes & soil carbon sequestration 🦠🅲

💡 Soil microbiome account for a direct contribution of C to the soil, and to the stabilization of soil C.

📰 A recent comprehensive review by Mason et al. 2023 focuses on the role of soil microorganisms in soil carbon sequestration potential.

📊 The synthesis and storage of plant-derived carbon materials in microbial biomass and the resulting residues (necromass) are significant factors, contributing to approximately 50 to 80% of stable soil organic carbon (SOC).

🛠️ Key mechanisms that have the potential to influence microbial-mediated soil C stocks formation include:
-> 🇦 Support of the transfer of labile C to recalcitrant pools by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi
-> 🇧 Soil aggregation
-> 🇨 Improvement of plant growth and resilience (increase in C input).

🔎 The authors explore the possibility of utilizing biochar and microbial inocula as potential strategies to address the existing constraints in building and preserving soil carbon stocks.

Image: microbial contributions to soil C sequestration and retention (credits: Mason et al. 2023; DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2023.137993).
#soil #microbiome #agriculture

Unwanted guest? 🌱🦟 Focus on plant galls formation

📚 Plant galls are nonreversible growths formed of plant tissue but caused by other organisms.

🌱 Many parts of the plant are capable of making galls for many types of organisms, enabling their colonization.

📌 Services galls provide for gall-inducers include:
- providing nutrients
- protection against biotic and abiotic stresses
- optimization of community interaction (for species living in groups)
- facilitated reproduction
- mode of transprtation

🔃 The relationship can take the form of mutualism, parasitism, or commensalism.

⚠ Most gall makers are harmless to the plant hosts except for deforming them and spoiling their appearance, but some gall makers are considered serious pests to farmers.

❌ Most galls are made for foes, some of which are deeply studied pathogens and pests: Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Rhodococcus fascians, Xanthomonas citri, Pseudomonas savastanoi, Pantoea agglomerans, rust fungi, root knot and cyst nematodes, and gall midges.

✔️ On the other hand, some of the gall-inducers may provide the services for the plants.
-> Plants make root nodules for nitrogen (N2)-fixing bacteria, which provide nutritional services for the plant.
-> Fig trees form galls for the immature developmental stages of a gall wasp, which as an adult provides pollination services.
-> Some host plants are benefitted by the galling and may exhibit improved abiotic stress tolerance (i.a. against freezing) thanks to a hyper-activated defense system.

🛠️ Galls contain large amounts of phytochemicals (such as tannic acid), which are widely used in the manufacture of medicines and insecticides. Extracts from galls also have been used throughout the world for making dyes.

Image: an overview of parts of plants that make galls and certain gall inducers (credits: Harris & Pitzschke 2019; DOI: 10.1111/nph.16340)
#biology #biotechnology #agriculture