It is now possible to observe the effects of climate change, which becomes more dangerous every year, in our daily lives. Increasing natural disasters such as floods and fires, and changing seasonal cycles are among the consequences of climate change. Scientists can create many predictions and scenarios about the future. But a new study reveals that microscopic creatures can play a big role in predicting the future.
The new research focuses on ‘protists’ that are not considered plants, fungi or animals, as you may remember from high school biology. You may have heard that there are tens of thousands of single-celled organisms in even a teaspoon of water. But did you know that protists, with over 200,000 known species, weigh twice as much as all the animals on Earth combined? Scientists have discovered that they can obtain important information about our future by measuring the response of these single-celled living communities to changing temperatures.
Can climate change be prevented by examining cells?
Jean Philippe Gibert, an assistant professor at Duke University, states that bacteria on the planet emit carbon dioxide when they breathe, just like us, but because their total mass is much higher than that of all living things except plants, they are among the creatures that emit the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is where protists that feed on bacteria come into play.
On October 19, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an experiment by Gibert, Dan Wieczynski and other researchers created small ecosystems in glass bottles for protists that feed on bacteria. In ecosystems where there are 10 different types of protists in each bottle, it was recorded how the increase in temperature affected the behavior of protists.
More precise predictions can be made about the future:
Stating that they aim to see the effect and reaction of temperature changes on living creatures, Gibert explained that they aim to measure the reaction to be given collectively in the future. Two weeks after 5 different bottles with temperatures set between 15-35 degrees, the results were checked and which species survived and how much carbon dioxide they released.
The researchers discovered that they could tell each species’ response to different temperatures by looking at their shape and size. It was understood that these changing factors directly affect the rate of collective respiration. Stating that this research is an important step in understanding how the microorganism communities will be affected by climate change and similarly how climate change will be affected by this situation, Wieczynski summarized the results of the research as follows; “With this research, we can apply the information obtained by examining the relationship between temperature and behavior at the species level to the entire ecosystem. ”
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