Life underground changes when a wildfire hits a forest. Many organisms will die from death. Some microbes are able to fire.
The term "fire-loving" is used for certain fungi. Tom Bruns, a mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said that after a fire, pyrophilous fungi show up from nowhere. Some sprout in bright colors. He said that they don't really know much about them.
A new study was published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology last month to find the food source that allows Pyronema to appear so quickly after a fire. The damage left by the fire may allow the fungi to thrive. That could affect how the environment recovers, as well as how much carbon gets released into the atmosphere after a fire.
A lot of carbon in the top layer of soil goes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, while some of it stays put as charcoal, or what scientists call pyrolyzed organic matter. The study found that the soil is less hot than it was, but still hot enough that any living organisms exploded and died.
Is Pyronema just living off of death? Pyr canonema might actually eat charcoal. Dr. Fischer said so.
According to Thea Whitman, an associate professor of soil ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it is difficult for many organisms to break down. She said there are certain microbes that can break it down.
The image is.
Pyronema and moss are on a soil aggregate collected by a woman.
After the Rim fire in California, the authors grew a fungus from samples collected by Dr. Bruns and his team. The Pyronema lived on charcoal and three other sources. They put the fungus in liquid nitrogen and sent it off for decoding.
A bunch of genes get turned on if it is trying to eat charcoal. Many genes were involved in breaking down the ring structures.
To confirm that the fungus was doing what it appeared to be, Dr. Whitman's lab grew pine seedlings in an atmosphere with carbon dioxide containing carbon-13, an isotope that makes it easy to trace, and then put the trees in a specialized furnace to form charcoal. Most of the carbon dioxide comes from what they are eating. The carbon-13 emissions suggested that the fungus was snacking on charcoal.
The researchers found that the normal carbon dioxide coming out of the fungus was more than the charcoal, suggesting that it was eating something else.
Pyronia can eat charcoal, but it really doesn't like it. The authors suggested that the fungi could first enjoy the dead organisms and then switch to charcoal.
The University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the study, said thatFungi are amazing at degrading compounds. It makes sense that they would be able to break it down. It would be useful to confirm the experiment outside the lab and in the wild, according to Aditi Sengupta, a soil microbial ecologist at California Lutheran University.
Pyronema is an important player in post-fire because it can help open up a food source for the next generation of creatures that can't eat charcoal. She said that if Pyronema can do it, maybe other fungi can as well.
The activities in the soil are what Dr. Sengupta wants. She pointed out that eventually that might lead to us losing the carbon in the soil. As climate change and other human actions drive more frequent and intense wildfires, we need to understand whether carbon stored in the ground as charcoal will stay there.
