Bittersweet Brexit by Charlie Clutterbuck

Author:Charlie Clutterbuck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786802088
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

The role of soil animals in global warming is little understood. Although the IPCC factor land into their calculations, they are predominantly physical and chemical factors. There is evidence that soil animals limit the amount of decomposition gases that would contribute to global warming by consuming microorganisms and thereby holding carbon in the soil – in living creatures.67

BIRTH OF THE EARTH

Soil animals were vital in the creation of soil. While this is something we can be sure Brexit will have no effect upon, I thought some of you might be interested, as it is quite an important and original theory.

Many people, including many evolutionary biologists, think that somehow plants and animals plopped out of the sea on to land at some point in geological history. But if they did, they would have landed on rocks. Reptiles can do that, but return to the water. Plant spores can do that to an extent. But there were no plant seeds that could do that until the plants colonised the land – when it was earth, not rocks.

If you consider the soil as a living entity, surely it must have evolved at some point. If you do believe it is alive, can you answer the next question: ‘When did the soil evolve?’ It wasn’t always there. It wasn’t there when our Earth came spinning off the sun 4,500 million years ago. There were just rocks and water, and later sludge. I reckon 90 per cent of the history of our Earth, was without earth.

My theory of soil evolution is that it happened around 350 million years ago, plus or minus 10 million years. I base this on the evolutionary age of all those small soil animals that I studied. All the time I was counting them, I knew that they were primitive creatures, as they pre-dated insects. Many are springtails, which used to be classed as insects but are now seen as the first hexapods – six-legged creatures. The other dominant arthropods in the soil – the mites – are pretty primitive creatures too. Insects came later. These creatures, along with worms and nematodes, created the first soils. Some – springtails – kept plants healthy, while others – the mites – dealt with plant remains.

I believe that the springtails came first from the sea, and kept the roots clean of debris and nasty fungi, while also encouraging good fungi for the plants. These fungi are called Mycorrhiza and increase transfer of nutrients into the plants, in exchange for energy from the plants. The springtails accidentally bring their fungal spores to the roots, acting like the bees of the soil – doing something useful accidentally. The soil mites probably evolved a bit later, as plant debris was washed to the oceans, and they came in to break that debris down.

Plants started growing in volcanic ash around the end of the Devonian period when two great continents collided to make one continent – Pangea. This period is known for its loss of fish and the evolution of fish with limbs, derived from fins, to move onto land.

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