Even if you have stood on a remnant of virgin prairie, it is hard to imagine what was lost when the tallgrass prairie was plowed. Settlers were staggered by the scope of the prairies, and they were more amazed by the richness of the soil. The biomass of roots beneath the ground was as dense and tangled as the biomass on top. And when the prairies were plowed, everything changed — the ecosystem, the structure of the soil, and, as it turns out, the microorganisms living in the soil.
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A team of scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has begun to use genomic techniques to analyze the subsoil microbial communities present in virgin prairie using samples taken from the few places it survives — cemeteries, mostly. What they found is abundant bacteria from the phylum called Verrucomicrobia, which is not present in the tilled fields that were once prairie.
These bacteria are not well understood, in part because they are hard to reproduce in the laboratory. Finding these bacteria is like finding a piece of a lost continent. We have almost no sense of what the prairie soils once looked like or what biotic realms they contained before they were turned under by the plow. These bacteria are a reminder of what was lost and gained when the virgin sod was broken.
It is hard to understand the variation in biological communities that extended over hundreds of millions of acres. No one who rode across the prairie in the 19th century through grasses up to their stirrups ever stopped to admire the subsoil bacteria. Yet they were as distinctive as the bison grazing in great herds above.
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