Fungus in Chernobyl nuclear disaster zone has mutated to 'feed' on radiation (2024)

I was going to ask about plastic eating microbes in my comment. Even metal eating microbes. I wonder how we'll handle that when they start destroying the foundation of civilization. Lol

We will invent something to kill them, as usual.

To a large extent, it probably won't be too bad because the density of plastics is still low in the general environment. If there are steep energy gradients, eventually life tends to take advantage of them.

Also there's the risk that we accidentally release some genetically modified bacteria and they prove to be hardier than expected.

I few months ago I learnt something related that may be a common knowledge to many here. I feel silly that I didn't know.

Earth had a plastic like problem before. There were no fungi that eat cellulose so dead trees were just piling up without degrading. Those trees turned into ~petroleum~ coal that we consume now.

That trees somehow turned into ~petroleum~ coal, I learnt in school. I used to imagine trees were somehow buried under stand suddenly and before they could be degraded they turned into ~petroleum~ coal under heavy pressure.

Only if antibiotic resistant bacteria don't kill us first.

We might soon need silicon-eating microbes.

Funny, we make plastics from petroleum, so it looks like some particular carbon atoms just don't want to go back in the circuit.

Very hard to do because silicon dioxide (aka quartz / glass) forms an inert physical barrier to prevent further oxidation. Kinetics and diffusion say no!

I’m not even remotely close to knowledgeable on this subject but I assume metal eating microbes are not possible because metals are not molecular and therefore there’s nothing for them to be broken down into

You mean coal. Petroleum was from the dead animals from millions of years ago.

Always trust humans when united

Yes, the Carboniferous Period! I learned about this a few years ago and was astonished.

> The world at beginning of the Carboniferous period was a humid, tropical place. Seasons, if any, were indistinct. The Carboniferous trees and plants resembled those that live in tropical and mildly temperate areas today. They grew in wetlands and were shallow-rooted. This, combined with their great height and ponderous weight, was a bad combination, because these enormous trees would regularly become uprooted and topple into the marshy ground, landing on other trees that preceded them.

> Here is where fate steps in. Although trees had evolved lignin and cellulose, no bacteria that could digest these woody substances had yet evolved. In fact, those bacteria would take another 60 million years to evolve. All this time huge trees kept growing, crashing into the swampy ground, and piling up on top of uncounted other trees, getting buried deeper and deeper into the ground. Over millions of years, subjected to the heat and pressure of deep burial, the carbon in these trees was converted into the fossil fuels we know and love today – coal, oil, and natural gas. All the fossil fuels we use were produced during this 60-million year period.

https://emagazine.com/carbon-in-trees/

Isn't that nuts? It took like 50 million years.

Meanwhile we got plastic-eating bacteria after like 100 years.

This was my take for a short story I banged out one week after reading about the metal-eating microbes. Basically, humanity was all "three cheers for these little guys helping us fix all the pollution, etc" then shifting to "huh, that's an awful lot of changes happening to the gas content of the air and oh, didn't you corporate guys who sold us these solutions say you had these microbes under control? Oh, you did? But...like past tense?"

I read too much dystopian sci-fi to write much else, but in truth, I have pretty high hopes for these garbage-eating microbes.

All the fossil fuels? Aren't some made of dead dinosaurs?

Algae and phytoplankton, but mostly algae. Not large creatures, generally. You'd get massive blooms with phyto/zoo plankton die-offs, they'd settle, then get buried in sand and sediment. Over centuries and millenia, you'd get cyclic deposits, creating massive accumulations, and then over geologic timeframes, you get pockets of striated deposits of these decomposing materials in high heat and pressure conditions. Once the deposits liquefy, they all flow into a common area.

Depending on the conditions and chemistry, you can get coal from ancient algal sources, but you can't get petroleum / liquid oil from ancient forests - the chemistry doesn't work out. You need lots of water and heat and pressure, single cell structures. Lots of cellulose and lignin means you don't get the liquefaction and mixing, forcing the material to carbonize and compress instead.

There has been a lot more plant biomass over the eons than dinosaurs

Why is this being down voted? It's a question?

It could be that the bacterial life was less varied than now. Fewer starting points reduces the chance of a particular useful set of mutations coming together. The individual parts might have randomly occurred a great many times before they happened in one population.

Also the availability of other resources might have meant that even if eating the tree parts did develop earlier it just wasn't enough to be a key survival advantage, especially if initial “versions” of the process were inefficient. Perhaps what happening was in one strain it lost the ability to feed on the older sources but had the latent ability to consume the new ones, even if much less efficient, so switched and continued from there to quickly refine the process via further mutation. Changes in the availability of other components, which the trees themselves will have had a hand in, will have changed the balance but over a significant amount of time.

Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly the components of our plastics and how they hang together are not that novel, requiring less changes to come together in one individual or population to make consuming them practical.

When I was younger, I picked up a copy of "Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters"[0] at a used book sale. While the book itself was rather shlocky, I always thought the premise was very compelling.

From memory; a scientist created a breed of bacteria that could digest a special food-like plastic, which was accidentally released, but sporulated as their special food source could not be found in the environment. Decades later, a product company introduced "bio-degradable" plastic for greener packaging, which happened to be similar enough to their original food source that the bacteria were able to feed on it. Unfortunately for humanity, plastic itself was also much more widely distributed in the current year, and the bacteria was able to make the jump from eating this plastic to eating "any" plastic. (For added drama, this process also resulted in the release of explosive gases - methane, maybe?)

Also perhaps related, I also picked up The Last Gasp[1] at the same book sale, another speculative sci-fi about global warming. It was very influential on my preteen mind.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1685500.The_Last_Gasp

Can you elaborate on this? Nothing could get through that barrier? Like is it impossible for fungi to do that?

HF-secreting microorganisms with a tropism for a material extremely common in the human environment? No way that could go wrong.

I'm not asking if it could go "wrong", which is a matter of perspective though.

Thanks for sharing! I will have to check out The Last Gasp. Heck of a title, that. The reviews seem to paint it as something that's up my particular alley.