http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-02/oldest-known-fossil-of-a-land-dwelling-plant-is-a-fungus/7214510

Earliest discovered land organism

monkey skipper said:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-02/oldest-known-fossil-of-a-land-dwelling-plant-is-a-fungus/7214510

Earliest discovered land organism

Cool. I love fungi.

Lichen is also famous for collecting particles to make soil….I thought ….? And… even in areas of rock formations and prior to the conditions Required for moss formation at the primary and simplest level.

monkey skipper said:

Lichen is also famous for collecting particles to make soil….I thought ….? And… even in areas of rock formations and prior to the conditions Required for moss formation at the primary and simplest level.

yes.

Life is tough on the land…

It remains the case that the great bulk of the biosphere is in the ocean, with a much greater variety of animal life but plant life mainly simpler.

monkey skipper said:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-02/oldest-known-fossil-of-a-land-dwelling-plant-is-a-fungus/7214510

Earliest discovered land organism

I am a little confused about the claim that these fungi fossils (440 million years old) are the earliest known fungi, as green plants and fungi, are known from an earlier age. Perhaps they mean the best preserved fungus. Anyway wiki provided the following:

The Ordovician Period 445-485 million years ago produced the first land plants (and fungi). These plants however, were non-vascular (mosses, liverworts, etc, are non-vascular plants of today).

>>Invertebrates diversify into many new types (e.g., long straight-shelled cephalopods). Early corals, articulate brachiopods (Orthida, Strophomenida, etc.), bivalves, nautiloids, trilobites, ostracods, bryozoa, many types of echinoderms (crinoids, cystoids, starfish, etc.), branched graptolites, and other taxa all common. Conodonts (early planktonic vertebrates) appear. First green plants and fungi on land. Ice age at end of period.<<

>>The arrival of the first vascular plants, the rhyniophytes and their relatives (as are most of today’s land plants are vascular) was during the Silurian Period 410-440 million years ago.<<

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

monkey skipper said:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-02/oldest-known-fossil-of-a-land-dwelling-plant-is-a-fungus/7214510

Earliest discovered land organism

How do you find a fossil “shorter than a human hair is wide” in rocks that don’t contain any other fossils? Oh wait, they must contain marine and land fossils mixed together. What type of rock is it? Chert? No, limestone and shale.

> 440 million years ago

That’s the same age as what? That’s Silurian. Lots and lots of marine animals around by then. The Silurian was the first period to see macrofossils of extensive terrestrial biota, in the form of moss forests along lakes and streams. However, the land fauna did not have a major impact on the Earth until it diversified in the Devonian. The first bony fish were appearing.

dv said:

Life is tough on the land…

It remains the case that the great bulk of the biosphere is in the ocean, with a much greater variety of animal life but plant life mainly simpler.

False, by far the greatest bulk of the biosphere, as measured in tons of carbon, is on land, and mostly in trees. I’ve often wondered why, I suspect that the ocean’s carbon got lost when it got converted into inorganic carbonate.

mollwollfumble said:

dv said:

Life is tough on the land…

It remains the case that the great bulk of the biosphere is in the ocean, with a much greater variety of animal life but plant life mainly simpler.

False, by far the greatest bulk of the biosphere, as measured in tons of carbon, is on land, and mostly in trees. I’ve often wondered why, I suspect that the ocean’s carbon got lost when it got converted into inorganic carbonate.

Seems you’re in the minority there. Bacteria make up the bulk of life on earth, by mass.

http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150368/

The worldwide bacterial biomass exceeds that of all plants and animals on Earth.

dv said:

mollwollfumble said:

dv said:

Life is tough on the land…

It remains the case that the great bulk of the biosphere is in the ocean, with a much greater variety of animal life but plant life mainly simpler.

False, by far the greatest bulk of the biosphere, as measured in tons of carbon, is on land, and mostly in trees. I’ve often wondered why, I suspect that the ocean’s carbon got lost when it got converted into inorganic carbonate.

Seems you’re in the minority there. Bacteria make up the bulk of life on earth, by mass.

http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150368/

The worldwide bacterial biomass exceeds that of all plants and animals on Earth.

My information was old, and specifically excluded bacteria because bacterial biomass was unknown back then within a factor of a hundred or so.

Let’s see what we have now.

From Wikipedia biomass “ Apart from bacteria, the total live biomass on Earth is about 560 billion tonnes C”

From recent article “http://www.gso.uri.edu/blog/improved-estimate-of-earth-s-total-biomass/” the estimated biomass of subsea microbes has been downgraded from 300 billion tons to 4 billion tons. So oceanic bacterial biomass makes up less than 1% of whole Earth biomass.

So perhaps I’m not in the minority after all.

Let’s try that again.

dv said:
“the great bulk of the biosphere is in the ocean”
I replied:
“by far the greatest bulk of the biosphere, as measured in tons of carbon, is on land, and mostly in trees.”
dv replied:
“The worldwide bacterial biomass exceeds that of all plants and animals on Earth.”
quoting http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/150368/

Going to http://www.pnas.org/content/109/40/16213.full first, from the year 2012.

“In 1998, Whitman et al. estimated subseafloor sedimentary microbial abundance to be 35.5⋅10^29 cells, comprising 55–86% of Earth’s prokaryotic biomass and 27–33% of Earth’s living biomass.” Starting from that let’s calculate “Earth’s prokaryotic biomass”. It comes to 38 to 49% of “Earth’s living biomass”. Whitman’s work was based only on 6 Pacific sites.

The pnas update from 2012 is based on “57 total sites, 34 exhibited a characteristic decrease in cell concentration with correlation coefficients exceeding 0.5 for power-law maximum likelihood regressions. The 23 sites omitted from the study had regression values less than 0.5 due to noisy or erratic cell concentration trends.” That rejection of 23 sites, 40% of data, makes the results somewhat iffy, but better than Whitman’s with only 6 subsea sites. I’ll comment on that again later.

“Our estimate of total cell abundance in subseafloor sediment (2.9⋅10^29) is 92% lower than the previous standard estimate (35.5 × 10^29) (9). It is also ∼70% lower than other estimates of around 10⋅10^29 (7, 10). The reasons for this difference are twofold. First, our database is more geographically diverse than those of the previous studies. In particular, our database includes gyre areas with extremely low cell abundances. Second, like the most recent study (10) but unlike the previous studies (7, 9), we used estimates of actual sediment thickness throughout the world ocean derived from geophysical data.”

Hmm, from that, I’m happy to exclude the cell count of Whitman, but not necessarily accept 2.9⋅10^29 over 10⋅10^29. The reason for my conservatism is that I’m already familiar with a type of deep floor sediment called “pteropod ooze”. This appears frequently in many odd parts of the deep ocean, wouldn’t be expected to show any dependence on depth, and would be higher in bacterial biomass. Perhaps the 23 rejected sites have higher bacterial concentrations, the paper does suggest that.

Converting that to subsea microbial biomass. “subseafloor microbial biomass amounts to 4.1 petagram (Pg), with minimum and maximum estimates of 1.5–22 Pg C, respectively. This estimate is significantly lower than the previous estimate of 303 Pg C of Whitman et al. (9) and somewhat lower than the estimates of 90 Pg of Lipp et al. (10) and 60 Pg of Parkes et al. (32).” So somewhere between 4 and 90 petagrams of carbon.

Can I feed that back into the Wikipedia article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_
One Petagram is a billion tonnes. “Apart from bacteria, the total global biomass has been estimated at about 560 billion tonnes C. Most of this biomass is found on land, with only 5 to 10 billion tonnes C found in the oceans. On land, there is about 1,000 times more plant biomass (phytomass) than animal biomass (zoomass).”
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
So, to summarise:

Ocean nonbacterial 5 to 10 petagrams C.
Ocean floor bacterial/microbial 4 to 90 petagrams C.

Terrestrial plants+fungi 550 petagrams C.
Terrestrial animals 0.55 petagrams C.
Non-ocean-floor bacterial, um, has to be calculable from the above. 6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.

I think it’s a fair guess that by far the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface, and that non-prokaryote microorganisms have small total biomass.

Total ocean 9 to 100 petagrams C.
Total land (mostly plants) 600 to 800 petagrams C.

Most biomass on land. The great bulk of the biosphere is not in the ocean. And is not bacteria.

mollwollfumble said:

…
So, to summarise:

Ocean nonbacterial 5 to 10 petagrams C.
Ocean floor bacterial/microbial 4 to 90 petagrams C.

Terrestrial plants+fungi 550 petagrams C.
Terrestrial animals 0.55 petagrams C.
Non-ocean-floor bacterial, um, has to be calculable from the above. 6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.

I think it’s a fair guess that by far the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface, and that non-prokaryote microorganisms have small total biomass.

Total ocean 9 to 100 petagrams C.
Total land (mostly plants) 600 to 800 petagrams C.

Most biomass on land. The great bulk of the biosphere is not in the ocean. And is not bacteria.

Now have confirmation that “the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface”. Bacterial counts for open ocean and terrestrial soil are 1.2*10^29 and 2.6*10^29. The biggest uncertainty is the additional category of “subsurface terrestrial”, estimated at between 2.5 and 25*10^29 cells. Adding those three components up you see that it agrees with my above calculation of “6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.”

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

…
So, to summarise:

Ocean nonbacterial 5 to 10 petagrams C.
Ocean floor bacterial/microbial 4 to 90 petagrams C.

Terrestrial plants+fungi 550 petagrams C.
Terrestrial animals 0.55 petagrams C.
Non-ocean-floor bacterial, um, has to be calculable from the above. 6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.

I think it’s a fair guess that by far the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface, and that non-prokaryote microorganisms have small total biomass.

Total ocean 9 to 100 petagrams C.
Total land (mostly plants) 600 to 800 petagrams C.

Most biomass on land. The great bulk of the biosphere is not in the ocean. And is not bacteria.

Now have confirmation that “the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface”. Bacterial counts for open ocean and terrestrial soil are 1.2*10^29 and 2.6*10^29. The biggest uncertainty is the additional category of “subsurface terrestrial”, estimated at between 2.5 and 25*10^29 cells. Adding those three components up you see that it agrees with my above calculation of “6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.”

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

…
So, to summarise:

Ocean nonbacterial 5 to 10 petagrams C.
Ocean floor bacterial/microbial 4 to 90 petagrams C.

Terrestrial plants+fungi 550 petagrams C.
Terrestrial animals 0.55 petagrams C.
Non-ocean-floor bacterial, um, has to be calculable from the above. 6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.

I think it’s a fair guess that by far the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface, and that non-prokaryote microorganisms have small total biomass.

Total ocean 9 to 100 petagrams C.
Total land (mostly plants) 600 to 800 petagrams C.

Most biomass on land. The great bulk of the biosphere is not in the ocean. And is not bacteria.

Now have confirmation that “the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface”. Bacterial counts for open ocean and terrestrial soil are 1.2*10^29 and 2.6*10^29. The biggest uncertainty is the additional category of “subsurface terrestrial”, estimated at between 2.5 and 25*10^29 cells. Adding those three components up you see that it agrees with my above calculation of “6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.”

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

No, the WP article represents the current consensus: marine single-celled life makes up the bulk of life on earth by mass.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

…
So, to summarise:

Ocean nonbacterial 5 to 10 petagrams C.
Ocean floor bacterial/microbial 4 to 90 petagrams C.

Terrestrial plants+fungi 550 petagrams C.
Terrestrial animals 0.55 petagrams C.
Non-ocean-floor bacterial, um, has to be calculable from the above. 6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.

I think it’s a fair guess that by far the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface, and that non-prokaryote microorganisms have small total biomass.

Total ocean 9 to 100 petagrams C.
Total land (mostly plants) 600 to 800 petagrams C.

Most biomass on land. The great bulk of the biosphere is not in the ocean. And is not bacteria.

Now have confirmation that “the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface”. Bacterial counts for open ocean and terrestrial soil are 1.2*10^29 and 2.6*10^29. The biggest uncertainty is the additional category of “subsurface terrestrial”, estimated at between 2.5 and 25*10^29 cells. Adding those three components up you see that it agrees with my above calculation of “6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.”

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

Yeah, why not? Someone will correct you if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Now have confirmation that “the largest component of non-ocean-floor bacterial biomass is terrestrial rather than ocean surface”. Bacterial counts for open ocean and terrestrial soil are 1.2*10^29 and 2.6*10^29. The biggest uncertainty is the additional category of “subsurface terrestrial”, estimated at between 2.5 and 25*10^29 cells. Adding those three components up you see that it agrees with my above calculation of “6 to 29*10^29 cells, that’s 50 to 250 petagrams C.”

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

Yeah, why not? Someone will correct you if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

So naiive. Those who edit wikipedia compete on the basis of how many edits they can complete in an hour, so edits are only those that can be completed in a minute or so. Those edits include only: revert to previous version, changes to typesetting so minor they can’t be seen, adding of what I call “bitch tags”, or – if they feel really energetic – deletions. No “scrutiny” ever checks facts or reads references.

Am actually having a bit of trouble with typical weight of bacteria. According to Kellerman each ocean floor bacteria weighs 1.4 metric units, but according to Kellerman’s quote of Lipp that’s a weight of 9 metric units. An unacceptable difference.

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

Yeah, why not? Someone will correct you if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

So naiive. Those who edit wikipedia compete on the basis of how many edits they can complete in an hour, so edits are only those that can be completed in a minute or so. Those edits include only: revert to previous version, changes to typesetting so minor they can’t be seen, adding of what I call “bitch tags”, or – if they feel really energetic – deletions. No “scrutiny” ever checks facts or reads references.

Am actually having a bit of trouble with typical weight of bacteria. According to Kellerman each ocean floor bacteria weighs 1.4 metric units, but according to Kellerman’s quote of Lipp that’s a weight of 9 metric units. An unacceptable difference.

I didn’t come from a mushroom though did I?

monkey skipper said:

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

Yeah, why not? Someone will correct you if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

So naiive. Those who edit wikipedia compete on the basis of how many edits they can complete in an hour, so edits are only those that can be completed in a minute or so. Those edits include only: revert to previous version, changes to typesetting so minor they can’t be seen, adding of what I call “bitch tags”, or – if they feel really energetic – deletions. No “scrutiny” ever checks facts or reads references.

Am actually having a bit of trouble with typical weight of bacteria. According to Kellerman each ocean floor bacteria weighs 1.4 metric units, but according to Kellerman’s quote of Lipp that’s a weight of 9 metric units. An unacceptable difference.

I didn’t come from a mushroom though did I?

No, this first fungus dates from 440 million years ago which is quite recent, you came from the first fish which was around 530 million years ago. The first fish may (or may not) have come from the first worm which was around, perhaps 600 million years ago. Which begs the question of course – what did the first fungus evolve from, and when did it first go multicellular?

mollwollfumble said:

monkey skipper said:

mollwollfumble said:

So naiive. Those who edit wikipedia compete on the basis of how many edits they can complete in an hour, so edits are only those that can be completed in a minute or so. Those edits include only: revert to previous version, changes to typesetting so minor they can’t be seen, adding of what I call “bitch tags”, or – if they feel really energetic – deletions. No “scrutiny” ever checks facts or reads references.

Am actually having a bit of trouble with typical weight of bacteria. According to Kellerman each ocean floor bacteria weighs 1.4 metric units, but according to Kellerman’s quote of Lipp that’s a weight of 9 metric units. An unacceptable difference.

I didn’t come from a mushroom though did I?

No, this first fungus dates from 440 million years ago which is quite recent, you came from the first fish which was around 530 million years ago. The first fish may (or may not) have come from the first worm which was around, perhaps 600 million years ago. Which begs the question of course – what did the first fungus evolve from, and when did it first go multicellular?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

Yeah, why not? Someone will correct you if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

Fixed wikipedia. Results on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#Bacterial_biomass

roughbarked said:

mollwollfumble said:

monkey skipper said:

I didn’t come from a mushroom though did I?

Which begs the question of course – what did the first fungus evolve from, and when did it first go multicellular?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism
“Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 46 times”

OMG. Off hand I can only think of a four: higher plants (including volvox), bacterial chains, animals, fungi.
No information on that link for when fungi became multicellular, perhaps it was as late as the current find, 440 million years.

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

mollwollfumble said:

Should I fix Wikipedia on the topic?

Yeah, why not? Someone will correct you if it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny…

Fixed wikipedia. Results on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)#Bacterial_biomass

Which begs the question of course – what did the first fungus evolve from, and when did it first go multicellular?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism “Multicellularity has evolved independently at least 46 times” OMG. Off hand I can only think of a four: higher plants (including volvox), bacterial chains, animals, fungi. No information on that link for when fungi became multicellular, perhaps it was as late as the current find, 440 million years.

Fungi were also in the previous Period, many millions of years before.