Microbes and the Missing Carbon Dioxide | Peter Pollard | TEDxNoosa

chlamydia tuberculosis influenza don't forget a bowler disease and death I can see you're cringing from here what a terrible way to introduce myself but but these microbes are the ones that give bacteria and viruses their bad name which is very much undeserved because 99.9% of all the microbes on our planet are essential for our very existence we would not be here if it wasn't for these microbes the good microbes so I'm all about the good microbes of course we worry about the others because they affect us directly but you go remember the earth it's a closed system and so all the elements have to be recycled there is no such thing as water that hasn't been recycled and microbes ensure that both carbon nitrogen hydrogen and phosphorus and oxygen are all recycled on our planet god forbid my body doesn't decompose when I die so this someone else gets a chance to live but those processes of decomposition are essential for our existence and we have so much to bacteria we take for granted the air in this room the oxygen we are now breathing is the bacteria are responsible for because 3.8 billion years ago there wasn't ask Eric of oxygen in the atmosphere it was all methane carbon dioxide and nitrogen until the evolution of bacteria and a photosynthetic system that gave us the cyanobacteria now some people call them blue-green algae and think that if I call them that because they're not argue they are a bacteria with a photosynthetic system so whenever we chat after and you just don't don't let me hear you say blue green well in here a cyano bacteria they are bacteria over a period of two billion years they changed our atmosphere and synthesis because they turned the carbon dioxide back into oxygen and made sugars and you just gotta love photosynthesis I tell you I've just always seen or I light bit of co2 and we get oxygen and sugars and to this day our technology cannot replicate that system but I just think it's fascinating and of course at the same time as these ancient cyanobacteria did this their carbon got fossilized and was buried in the deep ocean and of course it's the oil and petrol they aren't we are now rapidly burning and putting back into the atmosphere and today's microbes can't work fast enough because they've evolved a rate of return of this return of co2 from the atmosphere to the deep ocean it's only about 0.01% but that rate has been fixed now we're putting it back at a massive rate because we're just burning the old sea of the old carbon hence our climate shifting now of course today oh sorry meant to say I haven't I forgot this slide the shirt in Shark Bay was Australia and the Atacama Desert these are remnants have you ever been there these are remnants of those very ancient cyanobacteria so even today they still have stuff you our crops around so today carbon is recycled and the boat the bulk of that recycling happens through respiration every time you exhale you are putting back out the co2 that came from the carbon in the food you age now bacteria are doing the same thing they they aerobic what we call aerobic heterotrophic bacteria but I may know call them bacteria from now this is a little qualifier and they need dissolved organic carbon as food and then they use oxygen like we do and generate co2 and that's that's what I call dissolved organic are and the bacteria can only use its when it's dissolved and what I want to do is demonstrate to you with some sugar I stole from the cafe you say morning just for you and my spoon yeah so this sugar came from a plant of course and photosynthesis again bit alight with co2 and we get sugar and we're all that energy and lots of calories unfortunately and you put it under to put a little bit in here it's still solid right now and this is fresh water like you'd find any creek or dam drinking water and it's going it's going it's dissolving okay once that sugars dissolved we now have dissolved organic carbon so I'm gonna use that term a lot but that's what I'm talking about now the bacteria in this glass have now gone into they'll take them about half an hour but they're going into a feeding frenzy all of a sudden they've got all this organic carbon I've just put lots of oxygen in there and they've been gearing up and they're going to turn all that sugar back into co2 in a few days now I don't it would go cloudy I don't have a baked one to show you but believe me it will go cloudy and all that sugar will be gone in a couple of days but there we have closed the carbon cycle now there's a slightly recycle as I've described so what goes into the system through photosynthesis comes out in terms of carbon but there's a missing link we are short 2 Giga tons of carbon on that return pathway so when you mathematically model and put together all the natural processes we're missing Gigaton is 10 to the 9 but said that's 2 billion tons of carbon are missing in that return pathway so my quest has been to try and find this this source or this this pathway and how it returns and this is a bit of a spoiler I've kind of given away here but what I'm going to do is talk to you about my adventures and my Endeavour endeavors trying to have the last 15 years find this missing link and of course the answer is going to be in microbes now now I want to introduce you to all my best friends who are in this brown bag or my daughter scissors Brown I hope it's brown here they are Obie Obie Creek let's take the Muir Mary River let's let's start with that one one mill our freshwater is in the bottom of this test tube and this is typical of any river system of I've looked at him southeast Queens that that's one right that contains in a freshwater system one hundred million viruses ten million bacteria 100 million viruses that's four and a half times the population of Australia squeezed into the bottom of his test tube that is normal that's a natural freshwater system and they're all good bacteria and viruses okay don't forget that they're the good bacteria and viruses and I've measured how fast they replicate those ten million bacteria are replicating every 20 minutes they've stopped that test you because they've ran out of sugar if you like they've run out of their organic carbon so they can't do any more but in a natural system that's what's happening and I did this in the Brehme in in the early 2000s and I found for every kilometer of the Bremer River the Bremer River was putting out a half a ton of co2 into the atmosphere and when I first measured this I was astonished I'm as astonished as you are I can see the astonished look on your face already no seriously I and no one would believe me no one would believe me and even I didn't believe me so I went and did the game and then I went and looked on the lakes and creeks and rivers of South East Queensland didn't matter where I went we're at a productive system I got the same thing it's a hell of a lot of carbon and you don't see it no one sees it now I measures it because it's a well initially it's a very awkward process to measure but I've got a really good way of doing it and fast can do more now there you have to ask well how can this be ecologically how can this be and fortunate I can tell you now because taking 15 years to work it out but it's because of two things one the sugar that's going into our creeks and rivers the dissolved organic carbon it's not just sugar it's lots of anything anyway I think organic this dissolved is a great food source and the other are viruses and you need to know how viruses work remember 100 million as in 1 mil I've you've been looking at that for so there's pictures of them that was actually from the vemma so this is how a virus works it touches to the outside of the bacteria this is a virus landing on the Alpha the bacteria looks just like a lunar module landing on the moon seriously it's exactly what it looks like and so when it lands on their injects its DNA into the bacterial and then it takes over all the metabolic machinery of the of the bacteria makes lots of copies of itself and then the poor bacteria just it bursts out the bacteria all the guts of the bacteria go everywhere and that is literally more or the same organic matter going back into the water column so that happens not once but happens over and over again because more bacteria then eat it you know how long it took me to do this slide I went to it took me it took me a day to get that bacteria to eat that carbon but it did the chomping if that's what it's doing that it's actually eating dissolved organic carbon that's coming from those viruses so there cannibalizing their cannibalizing but and then each each time it goes through that cycle its bacterias using oxygen and it's generating co2 so you know it's same as us it's so all they're all its food and all the organic carbon it's going like that can't last it's going back out into the atmosphere that explains why the process happens so fast it's not a cycle once the once a virus and that cycles that process loop starts it's like a spiraling down and viruses are shutting off cutting off all the bacteria from passing up the food web you know how you always think our little things go to big things in few webs no there's a whole separate pathway over here where the bacteria are just have one job respire everything and then of course they make minerals and nitrogen phosphorus recycled that little the algae in the water column get eaten by small things macro invertebrates and officiants etc so it's the other pathway over here but I guess I just like the viruses and bacteria um I'm not a fish person as you can tell my colleague my colleagues love fish and algae okay so that that's that's the viral that's the viral that's the viral that's the viral side of the story now the dissolved organic carbon sauce this foodstuff you've got to have you've got to keep topping this freshwater something's topping up this freshwater all these freshwater systems with organic carbon that's coming in in huge amounts really fast and it's just going out just as fast for the reasons I just described terrestrial sources plants um and phytoplankton algae in the water column for it that's what we call phytoplankton and then there's us what we put back in and have you ever noticed fish gills after a storm event in your local Creek I know if you noticed but it's most likely not going to be toxins in fact it's rarely toxins it's because the storm water has washed all of ganic carbon in their catchment into the creek system and the processes I've just described bacterial viral lysis and bacteria turning over all the organic carbon have just gone into a freezing frenzy and so all of the organic carbon turns into co2 but what goes at the same time the oxygen so all fish suffocate and that happens so readily very easy easily sewage overflows another example of that but that's just massive all the fish kill won't because of toxins in the sewage it'll be because the organic carbon is driven this process and just goes so fast and goes out of a system the other thing that's right new so try Council has much nicer drains in this I've been wandering around news and they in their storm water drains they have great little pictures of all kinds of platypus and fish this is a very boring one but but this is my local one by the granite urgent's if I had any here I would turn it out pull it out part of herbal detergents and environmentally-friendly detergents they're intended made designed as to be great food for bacteria because they're intended to being in the sewage treatment plant that's why they called biodegradable that's why they're environmentally friendly if you end up letting did those detergents go into the gutter or streak they will end up in the nearest Creek the processes I've just described to you kick in and so you are very not protecting the environment by letting that happen so don't wash your dog your cat your house your car and let that water or that detergent end up in the nearest gutter because it will end up with a nearest Creek every gutter you see every drain you see will end up in your nearest Creek so organic carbon is a disaster in that Creek it's meant to be in the sewage treatment plant if you can keep it on your property and let it wash your car on the grass and you don't see any runoff it's with your Exodus soil is actually then being benefited from the microbes so it's a positive thing so one thing I had to ask though was all the work I've just described to you and the high rates of bacteria respiration I've been finding of all being in it see something wrong with this clock because I don't have a minute and 35 left away okay okay very quickly now I slowed down that's it you're in trouble now I mean I think I really fast okay so I wonder know if it wasn't to do with our environment so I picked all my stuff and went off to Panama with my all my equipment and I started looking at the Panama Canal and as you can see my only friend for four months was my camera so I'm talking to it an awful lot and what I did was I worked on it's called barro Colorado Island and it's totally pristine it's all forest and I spent after after four months of dodging alligators and drug runners from Colombia and getting in getting I'm serious and getting lost I got lost about four times end up in hospital for four days have a sky key to prove it and I discovered that it's just as high there's no there's no an environment here and fifty tons of carbon per day and then the rainforest itself the what doesn't go into the trees and and what doesn't get responded the land was 40 tons so is actually feeding the microbes in the fresh water around that system yes so anyway I've gone on and looked at other places around the old as well and didn't matter where I went the same thing except up in the boreal forests of North America and in Canada because what was happening there when it came to winter in their winter months it went through zero and what else to say okay so in summary one now at a time in summary rainforests are our in the sink of co2 we can't rely on them because what goes in comes out and all the microbes and the freshwater are consuming it and that's fair enough but we can't rely on organic carbon for in rainforests to actually stop us using fossil fuel we can't use it an excuse not to use fossil fuel we have to stop using fossil fuel who walked here today ah well done Hey who wrote their bike me I did no no else okay I knew I was gonna ask that question so I was cheated but the urban environment we're replacing with has all this stormwater in so we have to look at it because and we can't even determine what those sources are in our urban environment we have to find out what they are and I know I've made light of the washing car in the street that's not the only source there are a myriad outlets we don't even know about so we have to I'm gonna get thrown off here shortly I'm gay and we're going to have to find out what they are we're going to have to fix them on top of that um we're not actually calculate globally how much co2 is coming out of freshwater I calculate even though a freshwater is any point zero one percent of the entire planet its water and we're talking about surface waters any point I want but one percent it's generating as much as co2 into the atmosphere as the entire ocean is bearing and it's is it more then it's more than the annual burning of rainforests but there's no smoke there's no fight no flames out of sight out of mind but it's worse than that it's not in anyone's mind I've actually been to New York trying to talk to climate change modelers it's not even on their agenda so I would really look like us to stop using fossil fuel and get the fresh water onto the agenda my last slide is I just want to say that whenever I look at Earth I am just in awe at a beauty but when I start discovering the complexity below his surface I'm even more astonished I'm I'm just hoping that I've shared some of that discovery and complexity with you and then you can see that extra beauty that I've been able to see and thank you for being such our wonderfully warm audience oh yes Nina okay Peter get on your bike thanks Nina I will buy all thank you somebody though Peter Paul out ladies and gentlemen

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 23,671

Rating: 4.8833818 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Australia, Science (hard), Microbiology, Science, Water

Id: 48UtbgtFKTg

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2015