[HN Gopher] Sugar deposits found under seagrass meadows ___________________________________________________________________ Sugar deposits found under seagrass meadows Author : nradov Score : 187 points Date : 2022-05-23 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.theweathernetwork.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.theweathernetwork.com) | Tepix wrote: | > _The study reported that the giant piles of excess sugar were | not being consumed by the bacteria due to phenolic compounds | released by the seagrass, which cannot be digested by many | microorganisms. This was a key finding for the researchers, as it | confirms that the carbon in the sugar stays in these underwater | ecosystems and out of the atmosphere._ | | Interesting, sugar is so energy dense, isn't it just a matter of | time until some organism figures out how to take advantage of it | despite the phenols? | devoutsalsa wrote: | I'd guess that's correct. It reminds me of the Carboniferous | era when there weren't any organisms around that could eat | lignin, so dead trees just piled up until they were so thick, | they turned into coal. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous | fbanon wrote: | quantified wrote: | Downvotes indicate a lack of appreciation for your sarcasm. | No tone of voice available when writing. | guerrilla wrote: | I'm not sure why you think it was sarcasm... the video is | literally about that. 5.2K people liked that video, so | how do we know that person isn't one of them? | quantified wrote: | If it was sarcasm, I've given them a useful tip. If it | wasn't, I've gently trolled them. You couldn't hear my | tone either. | atombender wrote: | Note that this hypothesis has been challenged, e.g. here [1] | (paper here [2]). | | [1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/lack-fungi-did-not- | lea... | | [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113 | pfortuny wrote: | Honest question: don't animals do it? Or do you mean | "microorganisms"? | gumby wrote: | Many (most?) animals cannot digest straight glucose, e.g. | cats, which are obligate carnivores. I suspect most animals | would have to be able to digest starches to be able to | process sugars (though a good exception is the bee, so my | surmise could be bogus). | | I believe that cats don't even have sweet taste receptors. | I've done "experiments" over the years, offering my own food | to various of our household (terrestrial) pets. Cats and | rodents are the most picky; dogs will eat a proper superset | of what cats do, except that I have never had a dog that | liked drinking milk (eating cheese, though, sure, and ice | cream). Dogs seem OK with sugar (not crazy about it) cats are | utterly uninterested. | fingerlocks wrote: | I was curious, so I just mixed a teaspoon of sugar and | water into a paste and put it in my dogs' bowls. Two | completely different breeds. Both went crazy for it. Both | love Milk too. Neither dog will eat raw fruit | yetihehe wrote: | I had a dog which was absolutely crazy for cucumbers. He | was typically sneaking into garden, sniffing for | cucumbers among leaves, took it out and eat it. When I | was peeling cucumber, he was salivating and whimpering to | eat peelings, he would get angry if I didn't share at | least some of of them. My current dog eats almost | anything (he didn't like raw lemon), including most | fabrics, but he's only a year old. Had to electrify the | garden though because he digged and tried to eat compost. | colechristensen wrote: | An ancestor of all cat species lost a gene required for | sweet taste, so none of them could taste sugar which could | be why they became obligate carnivores. | nisegami wrote: | The key here is "despite the phenols". What any such organism | would need to develop is not so much a way to use the sugar, | but rather a way to safeguard against phenols. | pfortuny wrote: | Thanks. | grammers wrote: | Until some bacteria mutates to digest it. It's definitely not a | long-term solution. | bin_bash wrote: | Well the purpose of jam is to conserve fruit with sugar so | maybe not. Honey also doesn't spoil even after thousands of | years. | rightbyte wrote: | Sugar is a conservant too. Kills organisms by osmosis. | dylan604 wrote: | It is a very slow process though | tambourine_man wrote: | Only in much, much higher concentrations, like those of | honey. | kemiller wrote: | This is fascinating but how long before some enterprising person | mines it and puts it in chic packaging and sells it to bougie | consumers as "sea sugar" with implied health benefits? | gibolt wrote: | Or labels it as organic, and green? While actually damaging an | ocean ecosystem (that may help fend off climate change) | ghostbrainalpha wrote: | I wouldn't put that out there on this forum. It's full of | entrepreneurial persons who might like that idea. | aaron695 wrote: | say_it_as_it_is wrote: | Oh no. People are burning down the Brazilian rain forest for even | less to gain. | asn1parse wrote: | i dont often observe clickbait rise in these ranks | calebm wrote: | This doesn't seem particularly novel. It's already well | understood that plants deposit sugar into the ground they grow in | to encourage beneficial bacterial and fungal growth. It's | basically the plants gut: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere | mothsonasloth wrote: | New Coke, now made with high sucrose seagrass syrup. | notorandit wrote: | Cool! So everyone will try to harvest that sugar (maybe to | produce fuel?) so even more carbon can be released. Hot! | ordu wrote: | So in treacle mines[1] people mine for sugar from a prehistoric | sea? | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treacle_mining | yalogin wrote: | I don't understand the significance of this. What if we found | huge quantities of sugar, what does it mean to me, to the oceans, | to the environment? Not trying to be flippant, I am not able to | make the connection, but can someone dumb it down and spell it | out for me? | DeathArrow wrote: | It seems it's not enough to exploit it as fuel. | blakesterz wrote: | "That is roughly comparable to the amount of sugar in 32 billion | cans of Coke!" | | That's a unique unit of measure I've not seen before. I know in | one of Gary Larson's old books he had a comment on his | "skeletonize a cow in less than a minute" comic about how he | loves weird units of measurement like this. | | https://ifunny.co/picture/MMQBLmZr5 | [deleted] | yetihehe wrote: | There's a meme that americans will use anything to avoid metric | system. Typically with examples like "hole in the road with the | size of 2 washing machines". | titzer wrote: | American here, lived in Europe a while, but back. | | I got decent with meters. Recently, I've been thinking about | ways to visualize a billion. Here's one: | | There's a billion cubic millimeters in a cubic meter (cubic | yard). If you take a meter (yardstick) and visualize the 1000 | millimeters in it, then make a plane of that 1000x1000, i.e. | a million, then stack a thousand of those, that's a billion. | | I still can't get my head around it, TBH. A billion is a lot! | | But "billion cubes" are a nice unit; you can stack up a lot | of them to get more billions. | AaronM wrote: | I wonder if folks do that because its easier to picture a | hole the size of two washing machines. That would be like 4-6 | sq ft which can be more difficult to visualize. | sandworm101 wrote: | It can get more extremes than memes. Some government agencies | have policies specifically avoiding the metric system in | public announcements. Issue a statement about a 30 centimeter | wave event and a good percentage of people in coastal areas | might panic. Trial attorneys also coach witnesses to never | speak in metric as at least one person on every jury won't be | able to follow ... and two more will hate you for forcing | them to remember words they last heard in highschool. | badwolf wrote: | I like the "Large boulder the size of a small boulder" | measurement system by the San Miguel Sheriff. - | https://twitter.com/SheriffAlert/status/1221881862244749315 | xeromal wrote: | This is great lol | tmountain wrote: | There's a great Simpsons joke where Grandpa says, "the metric | system is the tool of the devil, my car gets 40 rods to the | hog's head, and that's the way I like it!" | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5-s-4KPtD8 | gen220 wrote: | For those who are curious, 1 rod is 0.003125 miles. Thus, | 40 rods is 0.125 miles. 1 hogshead is 1/63 of a US gallon. | | Thus, 40 rods to the hog's head is 7.875 miles per gallon, | 29.87 L/100km, or 3.348 km/L. | | EDIT: sorry, 1 hogshead is 63 US gallons. This comes to | about 0.002 miles per gallon... yikes! (divide all the | numbers in the previous paragraph by 63^2) | dwighttk wrote: | Huh. Why is a hogshead so small? If you had asked me to | guess I would have said like 3 1/32nd (or some weird | small additional amount) gallons. | | Wait. I'm seeing that hogshead is like 63 "wine" gallons, | not 1/63 gallon. (Not sure conversion of wine gallons to | usual gallons though.) | gen220 wrote: | Ooh you're totally right, thank you for pointing it out! | | I think my brain was subconsciously seeking a miles-per- | gallon result in a "reasonable" order of magnitude. | Edited original comment. | dwighttk wrote: | They don't make hogs like they used to | BizarroLand wrote: | From a quick search it seems both a normal gallon and a | wine gallon are measured at 231 cubic cm of liquid, so | they're the same. There is a proof gallon which only | counts the ethanol content of the liquid towards the | gallon, so a 100 proof alcohol would require 2 gallons of | liquid to equal 1 proof gallon of liquor. | cossatot wrote: | The greatest Simpsons car-and-measurement-unit bit is of | course this one: "She'll go 300 hectares on a single tank | of kerosene" which maybe makes sense if you're plowing a | field... Part of a pretty amazing 20 second bit. Pure old | Simpsons gold. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07vdtBMG4Kg | drewzero1 wrote: | If you wish that 20 seconds would last a little longer, | and also be remixed into a song, check out "Put it in H" | by Dankmus. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HXT7fDkf9I | chucksta wrote: | Those are/were real units | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogshead | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(unit) | Sebb767 wrote: | So his car takes roughly 300l to move 200m in SI units, | or 45000l/100km. | quantified wrote: | That's why it's Grandpa and funny. | kelseyfrog wrote: | Are there, by chance, any fake units that exist? | gostsamo wrote: | Does the Register's measurement converter count? | | https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards- | conver... | AaronM wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_m | eas... | ars wrote: | Yes, the smoot | buttocks wrote: | I'm fond of the shit ton. | | The Canadian metric equivalent is the metric crap tonne. | thedrbrian wrote: | Us brits have "shed load" | dwighttk wrote: | Buttload is not fake however | cwillu wrote: | The shit tonne and the fuck load come to mind. | selimthegrim wrote: | F**stick? | irrational wrote: | Doesn't "avoid" imply that Americans are actually giving the | metric system any thought? | temp0826 wrote: | How many libraries of congresses is that? | [deleted] | donthellbanme wrote: | deaps wrote: | I mean that's easier to visualize than saying a "hole in the | road that is about 92 cubic centimeters." | pueblito wrote: | Where I'm from, we'd just say "There's a big ass hole in | the road" | ntoskrnl wrote: | Around here that's just a normal morning commute | Tagbert wrote: | Is that an imperial ass or a metric ass? | gus_massa wrote: | A big bottle of soda is 1000 or 2000 cubic centimeters. A | can of soda is 200 or 300 cubic centimeters. A glass of | water has 200 or 300 cubic centimeters. 92 cubic | centimeters is half a glass of water. | Zababa wrote: | I think that's because they're not really equivalent. At | least for me, a hole the size of 2 washing machines is | something that will look close to two washing machines put | together. That limits the shape it can have. On the other | hand, 92 cubic centimeters doesn't. It could be a 1cm x 1cm | x 92cm hole, which wouldn't be possible with 2 washing | machines. | | If we assume that the two washing machines are side to | side, and that the average washing machine is 60cm x 60cm x | 85 cm (height), that would be a hole 1.20m width x 60 cm | depth x 85 cm height. The washing machine example is still | easier to visualize, but it's also better than "a 612 000 | cubic centimeters hole". | snovv_crash wrote: | You'd say something like "2 cubic metres". Which is | roughly the size of 2 washing machines. | OJFord wrote: | I think 'hole in the road' comes with its own | visualisation more likely to be accurate than anything | you get from 'two washing machines'. | harry8 wrote: | How do you accurately visualize whether "hole in the | road" means you saying "what was that?" And driving on | without slowing. Or whether the hole will require a crane | to get your car to a place where it can be towed if you, | possibly inadvertently, attempt to drive over it? | OJFord wrote: | I meant regarding shape. | replygirl wrote: | holes can be all sorts of shapes | OJFord wrote: | But rarely like washing machines. (Which can also be all | sorts of shapes anyway.) | brewdad wrote: | Aside from side by side vs stackable, every washing | machine I've ever encountered is roughly the same shape. | Some edges are rounder and the door might be on the front | or the top but the shape is the same. | OJFord wrote: | The vast majority are approximately cuboid boxes, sure. | Ever seen a hole in the road like that? | brk wrote: | So like 1/20th of a cubic fathom? | peoplefromibiza wrote: | > hole in the road that is about 92 cubic centimeters | | 92 cubic centimeters is a pretty small hole... | | a hole in the road 1.5mx80cmx60cm is pretty easy to | understand or imagine, when you know metric system and | absolutely trivial to convert: ~0.70 cubic meters or ~700 | liters or ~700.000 cubic centimeters | | Washing machines comes of all sizes. | | Is it like the slim one I have at home to save space or | like the ones I find in laundromats? | | Metric units have standards. | | I don't know how many people would understand "a hole in | the road the size of 137 trays of home made tiramisu" | | TBF here too when the media want to make analogies, they | are pretty terrible: "an asteroid the size of 8 soccer | fields" means nothing to me, ~800 meters makes much more | sense. | dhosek wrote: | I'm fond of odd measures. I like to say that something is the | size of a [?]'s head, for example, "that burger is the size of | a cat's head." I also will describe a date as being a week and | a half from some arbitrary date. | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | I used to work in a produce department, so I do the same | thing but with fruits and veggies. | somishere wrote: | V. useful for your next pregnancy | johncoltrane wrote: | I dread my coming house move because of how many billies of | books I have :-). | dhosek wrote: | My problem with moving is always that once I've unpacked | the books and the music stuff, I tend to lose interest so I | end up with boxes of stuff lurking for months afterwards. | Being married helps a bit, but my wife has her own blind | spots and we still have boxes in the basement eleven years | later that have yet to be unpacked. | Wohlf wrote: | When it comes to moving books I measure in how many days it | will take to stop being sore. | cobbal wrote: | I do a very similar thing. Sometimes when I describe my | height, I'm "five and a half foot, nine" | memling wrote: | > That's a unique unit of measure I've not seen before. | | There are some fun Wikipedia entries on the subject: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu... | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_meas... | 1970-01-01 wrote: | A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion | minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the | Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday | morning. | | --Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, | April 1997 | slim wrote: | so that represents between 32 and 64 days of coca cola | production of 1997. | ajmurmann wrote: | Putting it that way made me immediately think that that's less | than 4 cans per person. I would have thought that more actual | cans of coke were in circulation. | postingawayonhn wrote: | Well they apparently sell nearly 2 billion bottles a day. | flint wrote: | Did you see where OP changed the units of measure from cans | to bottles... | jvanderbot wrote: | One evening as the sun went down | | And the basalt fire was burning | | Down the track came a mermaid swimming | | and he say "Boys I'm not turning" | | I'm headed for a pond that's far away | | beside the seagrass fountains | | so come with me and we'll go and see | | The big rock candy mountains. | bozhark wrote: | Thank you for changing the title | monkeybutton wrote: | I wonder if would taste good fermented and distilled. There's | rarely a source of sugars that humans haven't tried to make into | booze. | nisegami wrote: | You might be on to something. It already has phenols, which are | basically alcohols. /s | INTPenis wrote: | No let's not take any large quantaties of anything else from | the ocean. Leave it. | christophilus wrote: | Wild. Let's hope it never becomes an economically viable thing to | harvest. | VGltZUNvbnN1 wrote: | I bet in 1-2 days you will find some twitter users who will | write an essay about how we should harvest ocean sugar and | plant more wheat instead of corn or sugar beets. | slackfan wrote: | Time to get minin'. | derriz wrote: | "between 0.6 and 1.3 million tons of sugar" doesn't sound like a | lot? Humankind is adding 35 BILLION tonnes of carbon dioxide per | year. | vmception wrote: | > just one square kilometre of seagrass stores nearly twice as | much carbon as forests on land at a rate 35 times faster | | Time to kill the seagrass meadows | tediousdemise wrote: | Haha, seriously. | | Us humans will completely devastate anything we can get our | greedy, shitty little monkey paws on. | tediousdemise wrote: | Cool! But let's give the rampant environmental destruction a | break and leave the ocean sugar right where it belongs in its | natural ecosystem. | idbehold wrote: | Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain | | With the seagrass and their excreted sucrose. | | - Neil Young maybe | late2part wrote: | Come on, Charlie! Let's go to Seagrass Meadows! | photochemsyn wrote: | Original paper: | | > "Here, we show that the seagrass, Posidonia oceanica excretes | sugars, mainly sucrose, into its rhizosphere. These sugars | accumulate to uM concentrations--nearly 80 times higher than | previously observed in marine environments. This finding is | unexpected as sugars are readily consumed by microorganisms. Our | experiments indicated that under low oxygen conditions, phenolic | compounds from P. oceanica inhibited microbial consumption of | sucrose." | | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01740-z | | A sugar like glucose is ~180 grams/mol. A uM concentration of | glucose is going to be less than a milligram of sugar per liter | of ocean water. In contrast, a liter of Coke contains ~120 grams | of sugar (~ 0.6 M). | | It's kind of interesting because the seagrass appears to be | feeding sugar to bacteria, which might be doing nitrogen fixation | in return, but it's hardly 'mountains of sugar'. | aristophenes wrote: | Yes, and the carbon storage of all the seagrass sugar in the | world is roughly equivalent to one day of automobile driving in | the USA. But everywhere in the article it is phrased to make it | appear like a world changing amount of carbon. Why? | montalbano wrote: | I think the point of the article is that understanding how | seagrass captures carbon is useful and interesting. | | For more relevant numbers, I did a very quick calculation | (tell me if you spot a mistake). | | Using these numbers [0, 1], the worlds seagrass captures ~5% | of US automobile emissions per year. | | Another number of interest, the amount of seagrass carbon | sequestration is 2 - 4x greater than mature tropical | rainforests (per hectare) [0]. | | Seems to me that seagrass is an organism worth understanding. | | [0] https://www.thebluecarboninitiative.org/about-blue-carbon | | [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120499/us-road- | vehicle-... | wolfram74 wrote: | It's my understanding that early steam engines were pretty | rubbish until the underlying thermodynamics were understood | and then you could engineer your way to a Watt Engine [0] | that was revolutionary. The nearly two order of magnitude | superiority of this sea grass on this metric is | tantalizing. | | [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine | i386 wrote: | > I think the point of the article is that understanding | how seagrass captures carbon is useful and interesting. | | You've perfectly described why pure research science has | merit in its own right. | | Application of knowledge comes a little later. | dwighttk wrote: | The ocean is big though. I think the headline writer was | imagining the piles of sugar if you pulled it all out of the | water and stacked it up. | BoiledCabbage wrote: | I mean with that logic, there are mountains of lint in | people's pockets. And mountains of cobwebs in their | basements. | | Just about everything forms a mountain if you combine all | instances of it in the world into a big pile. | | If anything, it'd only be notable if something didn't form a | mountain when piled. | dwighttk wrote: | Imagine if lint was a well known food for bacteria and all | the sudden it might be notable if bacteria were leaving it | alone in pockets | patall wrote: | Are you Dutch? 1g of lint per human is ~8,000 tons, which | at 4g/cm3 is a cube of ~14m. Mountains are huge ;) | umvi wrote: | It's notable because it's free energy that isn't being | consumed for some reason. Sprinkle some sugar on the ground | outside and ants will swoop in and grab it in minutes. | hoseja wrote: | Seagrass only grows in the shallows. | dwighttk wrote: | Not as big, but still pretty big. | divbzero wrote: | For alternative points of reference, ~120 g of sugar is ~140 mL | or ~0.60 US cups. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | That is really interesting. Can we cultivate sea grass to make | carbon capture ponds or forests? | nradov wrote: | Sea grass already grows pretty much everywhere it can grow, so | I don't think we can cultivate a lot more (at least not without | disrupting other sensitive marine ecosystems). It's more | important to prevent pollution that would kill existing sea | grass. | montalbano wrote: | Have you got a reference for that? | | This article suggests that "92% of the UK's seagrass has been | lost in the past two centuries, with 39% disappearing just | since the 1980s, thanks to pollution from industry, mining | and farming, along with dredging, bottom trawling and coastal | development." | | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/05/seagrass. | .. | s1artibartfast wrote: | What are the limiting factors for it's range? Is there a | critical nutrient that can be introduced? | pvaldes wrote: | > What are the limiting factors for it's range? | | Fishermen and recreational sports | sandworm101 wrote: | It is grass. It needs sunlight and a substrate on which to | grow. That means shallow/clear water over a sandy bottom, | not a common thing in the ocean. | s1artibartfast wrote: | Seems like sunlight and substrate is much more common | than seagrass is. I found this paper [1] that talks about | the difference. | | It estimated the area of suitable sunlight and substrate | to be 4,320,000 km2 but estimated seagrass coverage of | 177,000 km2. | | I think this big difference indicates that there are | additional factors at play. | | https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7d | 06 | sandworm101 wrote: | Earth has something like 150 million square kilometers of | ocean. 4mil is a tiny corner of that area. Depth/light | remains by far the primary limitation for sea grass, | preventing it from even attempting to colonize the vast | majority of the worlds oceans. Compare other carbon sinks | like plankton which can exist across the ocean | irrespective of water depth. | s1artibartfast wrote: | Sure, but Im not asking why seagrass doesn't cover the | entire ocean or entire planet. | | I'm asking why it doesn't cover more area than it | currently does it appears that light and substrate is an | insufficient answer. 90% of the area with suitable light | and substrate is not covered, so something additional is | going on. | dymk wrote: | That's what https://www.runningtide.com/ is trying to do | jerf wrote: | "The research stated that if microorganisms consumed the | sucrose stored by the roots of the seagrass, at least 1.54 | million tons of carbon dioxide would be released into the | atmosphere, which is equivalent to the carbon emissions from by | 330,000 cars in one year." | | Those number strongly suggest no. "A million tons" and | "hundreds of thousands" may sound large but in this context | they're tiny. And if we did try to farm these we'd have to | displace other ecosystems for the farm land (under ocean). | s1artibartfast wrote: | >And if we did try to farm these we'd have to displace other | ecosystems for the farm land (under ocean). | | but that isn't necessarily a problem. | somishere wrote: | There's a lot of work going into blue carbon efforts at the | moment .. better understanding and utilising seagrasses and | algaes, mangroves, etc. as carbon sinks. | | That said, what I've never understood about the potential of | seagrass as a carbon sink (and this sugar thing might go | someway to explaining it), is how it works given how short | lived individual plants are, and how fragile - and shallow - | seagrass ecosystems are. | | CO2 / methane (?) released by decaying biomass at depth may | stay trapped in sediment, but how realistic is this at depths | of 20-40m? Does anyone have any more info? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-23 23:00 UTC)