Did you know that the dirt in your local park is full of bacteria? Each scoop of soil contains millions of bacteria. And it's not just in your local park, soil bacteria are everywhere. This is part of the reason why the total mass of bacteria on the planet outweighs all of the eukayotes combined, including elephants and whales.
There are hundreds of different species of bacteria in your local dirt. They are as different from each other as moose and mushrooms.Did you ever wonder whether the bacteria in Australian soil are similar to the bacteria in Austrian soil? Delgado-Baquerizo and his colleagues did, so they tested soils from all over the world. The results are published in a recent issue of Science (Delgado-Baquerizo et al., 2018).
The answer is yes ... and no. They looked at 237 locations on all continents except Antarctica. Most samples had about 1000 different species—the authors call them "phylotypes" because it's hard to define what a species is in bacteria. Only a small number of species (phylotypes) were found in all locations (511 out of 25,224 = 2%) but they accounted for almost half of the total mass. Here's how the authors describe their result ...
Together, our results suggest that soil bacterial communities, like plant communities, are typically dominated by a relatively small subset of phylotypes.Most of those 511 dominant phylotypes fall into two large and diverse clades (phyla?): Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria. The distribution is shown in Figure 1 of the paper (left). It illustrates a little-known fact about bacteria; namely, that they are a very diverse group. Scientists are only beginning to explore this diversity. Only 18% of the 511 dominant phylotypes were previously known to science!
Image Credit: Bacillus Sp. soil bacteria from The ecology of soil-borne human diseases
Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Oliverio, A.M., Brewer, T.E., Benavent-González, A., Eldridge, D.J., Bardgett, R.D., Maestre, F.T., Singh, B.K., and Fierer, N. (2018) A global atlas of the dominant bacteria found in soil. Science, 359(6373), 320-325. doi: doi: 10.1126/science.aap9516