#giftsfromplants II
Gifts from Plants II: Life from Light
#giftsfromplants
Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Image source: https://www.deq.ok.gov/state-environmental-laboratory-services/environmental-public-health-information/harmful-algal-blooms/what-are-cyanobacteria/
Pond gems masquerading as sludge monsters - you can't hide your beauty and power from me!
Today I want to thank #cyanobacteria who as the name suggests are a bluey- green* (cyan) group of photosynthetic bacteria - not plants! They live in a wide variety of moist soils and water either freely or in a symbiotic relationship with plants or lichen-forming fungi. They have a lot to teach us about forming and maintaining healthy relationships but what I want to thank them for today is just life as we know it, that’s all.
I feel cyanobacteria is such an important place to really kick off this #giftsfromplants campaign for so many reasons. Even though cyanobacteria are not visible as individuals without a microscope, their contribution to our existence is almost incomprehensible. On a daily basis they contribute massively to the global primary production of the oceans (ie. Forming part of the base of oceanic foodwebs) and are often the front line responders in extreme environments like deserts or responding to systemic imbalances like fertiliser run off. But the big thank you goes to the ancestors of cyanobacteria who can be described as nothing short of the architects of Earth's atmosphere. Without these organisms we would not be here so I feel that is an appropriate and necessary place to begin introducing #giftfromplants in the Foodweb Education context. As mentioned in my previous post a lot of our work involves making the invisible visible and drawing attention and understanding to the important and transformative roles and relationships of microorganisms and their communities.
Cyanobacteria, these microscopic jewels (I mean aren’t they beautiful) have given us the ultimate gift a habitable planet. These are the organisms that not only evolved to photosynthesize and initiate the biological capture of the sun’s energy and make it available to other living organisms as chemical energy BUT they ended up producing so much oxygen that they caused a mass extinction paving the way and putting the evolutionary pressure on for organisms to show up that are able to use oxygen - like us eventually! Phew!
In the Foodweb program we use a practice of tracing or mapping energy flows through systems to create a habit of intuitively acknowledging and understanding energy transformations and our dependence on the sun and photosynthesis. Majority of the time you can trace the energy flow back to the sun. Cyanobacteria started the energy flow from the sun that makes and sustains most life and living systems currently residing on Earth! In the Foodweb program we are aiming to teach for a systemic understanding of the roles and impact of cyanobacteria and photosynthesis as well as how it relates to us personally. Exploring their impact on atmospheric change provides opportunities to develop a sense of and relationship with deep time, a life altering perspective. We aim to empower our students through this knowledge so they can make their own inferences and reach their own conclusions about anthropogenic climate change and actions around this. Cyanobacteria have immense power to alter both the physical world but also the worlds in our minds.
The gratitude is as immense as your impact cyanobacteria! This gift of developing the means to convert sunlight to sugar and the catastrophic yet serendipitous effects of this are the basis of EVERYTHING we know and need. One of my treasured and long awaited moments was finally making it to the west coast of Australia and seeing stromatolites (microbial reefs created by cyanobacteria ) with my own eyes and being overwhelmed and humbled by the story of these microbes and the collective, intergenerational action (another gift perhaps?).
Close up of Stromatolites at Hamelin Pool. Photo Marie Lochman / Lochman Transparencies
Not only do we owe cyanobacteria for infusing the Earth’s ancient atmosphere with the byproduct of their photosynthesis—oxygen, but they then went on to team up with other cells and made food for them in exchange for a home and what do you know - the ancestors of chloroplasts were born. Chloroplasts are like the factories in plant cells where photosynthesis takes place - inside of your broccoli, oak trees.. all the plants you know and love.
This barely scratches the surface of the gifts of cyanobacteria but that's enough from me for now. THANK YOU CYANOBACTERIA And thank you too for reading and hopefully joining us on this journey. I look forward to our next exploration of ‘gifts from plants’.
Check out this video on cyanobacteria from couch_microscopy on Instagram it captures the gifts of cyanobacteria so beautifully and succinctly so also a massive thankyou to couch_microscopy.
“Cyanobacteria
Mere pond scum slew the former world:
Some turquoise goo in fetid pools
By tepid wavelets slowly whirled;
Unnoticed and unlikely ghouls,
They softly exhaled poison mist
Into the throng of flitting wraiths,
Like butterflies, who danced and kissed
And ruled the Earth in its first days.
Those faery folk, great with promise,
So beautiful, so delicate,
Could not foresee the end of bliss,
And baffled, breathless met their fate.
Pause once, triumphant heir of slime,
And mourn those angels, so sublime.”
Other links to videos and picture books to help make the invisible visible check out:
Books:
-Our dear friends at
https://scalefreenetwork.com.au/small-friends-books/
-Tiny creatures: the world of microbes https://www.booktopia.com.au/tiny-creatures-dr-nicola-davies/book/9780763689049.html
-Ocean Sunlight: How Tiny Plants Feed the Seas (Sunlight Series)
https://www.amazon.com/Ocean-Sunlight-Tiny-Plants-Feed/dp/0545273226
Videos:
Professor Ian Stewart ‘How to Grow a Planet’ series - Life from Light
Cyanobacteria from the pond to the lab – Pondlife
Article:
Cyanobacteria - .an overview:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/cyanobacteria
*Can also be other colours
**As always, please let me know if I have included any inaccurate, offensive or misleading information.
Foodweb Education is gratefully living, learning and working on and with Country, Aboriginal land, land that has never been ceded. We acknowledge and pay respect to the Aboriginal communities as the enduring custodians of these lands, seas, air and waterways on this continent now called Australia. Our ecoliteracy program observes and is strengthened by the traditional ecological knowledge, worldviews and protocols of the First Nations culture where we are teaching as well as the wider Indigenous protocols of First Nations people and land based cultures across our planetary home, Earth.