Surprising Biodiversity Found in the Atacama Desert's Soil Ecosystems

📰 Original title: Atacama surprise: The world’s driest desert is teeming with hidden life

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Usuarios: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary: https://killbait.com/en/surprising-biodiversity-found-in-the-atacama-deserts-soil-ecosystems/?redirpost=9b3f7b45-c805-4c7a-a3f4-a7c8107c192b

#science #atacamadesert #nematodes #biodiversity

This new field of science shows #ElectrostaticEcology as part of pollination and parasites!

https://youtu.be/ql35lWxuaVU?si=4MpdZ1VzRe5zgaAy

#Pollination #Bees #Nematodes

🌄Atacama Desert: Nematodes thrive in extreme conditions
A new study reveals that even under harsh and extremely dry conditions, stable and surprisingly diverse soil communities exist. An international team led by researchers from the University of Cologne investigated tiny nematodes in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Read more ▶️ https://uni.koeln/UCRHL

📰 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67117-5

#uniköln #unicologne #AtacamaDesert #Nematodes #SoilLife #Ecology #ClimateChange

#Roundworms discovered in Great Salt Lake are new to science https://phys.org/news/2025-12-roundworms-great-salt-lake-science.html

"#Nematodes are ubiquitous on Earth... Yet none had been positively detected in #GreatSaltLake until 2022, when expeditions by kayak and bike led by Julie Jung recovered nematodes in the lake's microbialites, the lithified mounds covering parts of the lakebed... nematodes became just the 3rd metazoan taxon known to inhabit the lake's highly saline waters, the other #animals being brine #shrimp and brine #flies"

The sticky battle between microscopic #worms and predatory fungi comes with a genetic trade-off https://phys.org/news/2025-09-sticky-microscopic-worms-predatory-fungi.html

"predatory #fungi use specialized traps—adhesive nets—to capture their nematode prey... the nematode gene nhr-66 controls the production of cuticular #collagens that enable #PredatoryFungi to adhere and capture the #nematodes... While reduced collagen expression helps worms evade fungal traps, it also weakens their protective cuticle, highlighting an evolutionary trade-off"

The https://bsky.app/profile/imc2025.bsky.social
started for us and our #MountainSoilBiodiversity session. 🪱🦠🕷️

Priyanka Kashyap showing us the diversity and functional groups of #nematodes in Indian high mountains doing some #OpenTopChamber experiments.

#IMC2025

"There are 57 billion nematodes for every human on earth"
https://news.byu.edu/there-are-57-billion-tiny-wormlike-nematodes-for-every-human-on-earth-now-we-know-where-most-of-them-live

Some even on you or inside you.

Commentary on:
"Soil nematode abundance and functional group composition at a global scale", van den Hoogen et al. 2025
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1418-6

#Nematoda #nematodes

#Worms form living towers in nature to hitch rides to new habitats https://phys.org/news/2025-06-worms-towers-nature-hitch-habitats.html

Towering behavior and collective dispersal in #Caenorhabditis #nematodes: Daniela Perez et al. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00601-3

"If food runs out and competition turns fierce, they slither towards their numerous kin. They climb onto each other and over one another until their bodies forge a living tower that twists skyward where they might hitch a ride on a passing animal to greener and roomier pastures."