Home Sweet Home (Hello) 2

July 11, 2016

Probably most people would not include the photos in this week’s post under a Home Sweet Home title. However . . .  Yesterday I walked around the grounds of our new place and found some lovely bacteria. I could detect what they were doing before I saw the results. The filamentous white stuff is the product of one or more sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, and I could smell the SO₂. I found sulfur-oxidizing bacteria in the Vermilion River in September 2014. The pink bits here are young root shoots. The second and third photos are crops from the first photograph.

Update of July 14, 2016

Today I showed these photos to my mentor, Norrie Robbins. Here’s what she had to say: “You lucky—a sulfur cycle!  Watch during the year: does it abate in the winter (does the groundwater become oxygenated?). . . The strings are [produced by] Thiothrix (they have holdfasts).  If you just see a white biofilm, it is [created by] Beggiatoa (under the scope they move around).  In your image I think I see a little purple (purple sulfur oxidizers are strict anaerobes and need sunlight).”