Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Gives us Dementia

Viral infections including COVID are among the important causes of dementia – one more reason to consider vaccination

What is not generally recognised is the role of viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2 which caused COVID-19, have in causing dementia. Now recent research has shown that 'Long Covid' is emerging as one ot the most important causes of dementia.

Now, with many countries discontinuing the policy of isolating people with COVID-19 and allowing them to continue to work and mix socially, the virus is becoming endemic in the population, so the long-term effects, such as dementia are going to increase.

The following article by Professor John Donne Potter of the Research Centre for Hauora and Health, Massey University, New Zealand, reproduced from The Conversation under a Creative Commons open access licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency, highlights the role of viruses in dementia. The original article can be read here.

Viral infections including COVID are among the important causes of dementia – one more reason to consider vaccination

Credit: Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images

John Donne Potter, Massey University

With more of us living into old age than at any other time, dementia is increasing steadily worldwide, with major individual, family, societal and economic consequences.

Treatment remains largely ineffective and aspects of the underlying pathophysiology are still unclear. But there is good evidence that neurodegenerative diseases – and their manifestation as dementia – are not an inevitable consequence of ageing.

Many causes of dementia, including viral infections, are preventable.

COVID and other viral infections are centrally involved in insults to the brain and subsequent neurodegeneration. COVID-positive outpatients have a more than three-fold higher risk of Alzheimer’s and more than two-fold higher risk of Parkinson’s disease.

A study of almost three million found risks of psychiatric disorders following COVID infection returned to baseline after one to two months. But other disorders, including “brain fog” and dementia, were still higher than among controls two years later.

🚨I wrote about “brain fog”—one of the most common & disabling symptoms of long COVID (and many other pre-pandemic conditions), and one of the most misunderstood.

Here’s what brain fog actually is, and what it’s like to live with it. 1/ https://t.co/Gq8iylgfBr

— Ed Yong is on sabbatical (@edyong209) September 12, 2022

Among more than six million adults older than 65, individuals with COVID were at a 70% higher risk than the uninfected for a new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease within a year of testing positive for COVID.

More than 150,000 people with COVID and 11 million controls have been involved in a study of long-term consequences of acute COVID infection. A year after infection, there was an overall 40% higher risk (an additional 71 cases per 1000 people) of neurologic disorders, including memory problems (80% higher risk) and Alzheimer’s disease (two-fold higher risk). These risks were elevated even among those not hospitalised for acute COVID.

These 12 things can reduce your dementia risk – but many Australians don't know them all

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, can invade brain tissue. Other viruses can also cause direct damage to the brain. A study of almost two million people showed the risk of Alzheimer’s was markedly lower in those who had been vaccinated against influenza.

The cost of dementia

Dementia is characterised by progressively deteriorating cognitive function. This involves memory, thinking, orientation, comprehension, language and judgement, often accompanied by changes in mood and emotional control.

It is one of the major causes of disability among older people. Worldwide prevalence exceeds 55 million and there are almost ten million new cases annually. It is the seventh leading cause of death. In 2019, the estimated global cost of dementia was US$1.3 trillion and rising.

The best known form of dementia – Alzheimer’s – was first described in 1907. Dementia is generally described as developing in three stages:

• impairment of memory, losing track of time and becoming lost in familiar places
• further deterioration of memory with forgetfulness of names and recent events, becoming confused at home, losing communication skills and personal care habits, repeated questioning, wandering
• increased difficulty walking, progressing to inactivity, marked memory loss, involving failure to recognise relatives and friends, disorientation in time and place, changes in behaviour, including lack of personal care and emergence of aggression.

Omicron-specific vaccines may give slightly better COVID protection – but getting boosted promptly is the best bet

Treatments largely unsuccessful

There are no cures and no resounding treatment successes. Management involves support for patients and carers to optimise physical activity, stimulate memory and treat accompanying physical or mental illness.

Dementia has a disproportionate impact on women, who account for 65% of dementia deaths and provide 70% of carer hours.

We may know less about the pathology of dementia than we imagined: some key data are under scrutiny for possible inappropriate manipulation.

Alzheimer's theory undermined by accusations of manipulated data – but does not bring dementia research to its knees

But we do know about many of the causes of dementia and therefore about prevention. In addition to viral infections, there are at least four other contributing causes: cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes (especially if untreated), traumatic brain injury and alcohol.

The brain has its own immune system – cells called microglia. These play a role in brain development, account for 5-10% of brain mass and become activated by damage and loss of function. They are also implicated in Alzheimer’s and their inflammation has been shown to be central to its pathology.

Dementia is preventable

In the absence of effective treatment, prevention is an important goal. The association with viral infections means we should pay careful attention to vaccine availability and uptake (for influenza, COVID and any future variants) and place greater emphasis on combatting misinformation regarding vaccines.

The association with atherosclerosis and stroke, as well as diabetes, supports primary prevention that involves healthier diets (plant-based diets low in salt and saturated fats), physical activity and weight control.

Alcohol consumption is a major problem globally. We have allowed high intake to be normalised and talk about no more than two glasses per day as though that is innocuous. Despite the myth of some beneficial aspects of alcohol, the safest intake is zero drinks per week.

My article speaks about a study that showed that people who chronically consume alcohol and become unconscious because of it, their chances of having dementia increase 10 fold. https://t.co/0DOFf9X5Zx @mrcopsych

— Hannah (@Hannah46221416) September 29, 2022

This requires a complete national rethink around the availability and acceptability of alcohol as well as assistance with alcohol addiction and treatment of alcohol-related disorders.

Traumatic brain injury is associated with sport and, more importantly, falls and car crashes. It is recognised as a global priority and there is increasing awareness of the preventability of falls among older people. The management of head injuries is being ramped up in contact sports.

However, data on the impact of best management of the initial injury on subsequent risk of dementia are lacking and risk remains elevated even 30 years after the initial trauma.

The evidence that dementia has preventable causes, including viral infection, should better inform policy and our own behaviour.

John Donne Potter, Professor, Research Centre for Hauora and Health, Massey University

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

It seems then, that if you've fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax, you must now accept that the malevolent designer who designed the SARS-CoV-2 virus intended it to cause dementia in those who survived the initial attack. Unless, of course, you believe that it is a stupid designer who doesn't know what the organisms it is designing will do and is incapable of correcting its designs when it realises the consequences of what it’s done, if it has any concerns for those consequences. If the latter, you believe the designer has all the characteristics of a mindless natural process without a plan, exactly like evolution by natural selection.

Malevolent Designer News - How Ticks Are Designed to Make Us Sick

European tick, Ixodes ricinus

Study demonstrates for the first time that ticks weaken skin's immune response

Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not a fanatical perfectionist for whom no detail is too small in its quest to find ways to make its creation sick - or so you must believe if you've fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax.

Here for example is a paper in which the scientists have shown how well-designed ticks are for passing on infections to its victims, including humans and our livestock. The scientists found that tick saliva contains a powerful immuno-suppressant the prevent the body from reacting to the nasty little organisms it injects along with its saliva when it takes a meal. This also solves the mystery of why ticks are such powerful disease vectors. It almost seems they were designed for it.

The team of scientists led by led by Georg Stary (MedUni Vienna's Department of Dermatology, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases) in collaboration with the research group of Hannes Stockinger (Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology at MedUni Vienna) have published their paper, open access, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The Medical University of Vienna news release, explains the research and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - How the Precursors of Paired Fins and Limbs Evolved

Life reconstructions of the fossil Tujiaaspis vividus.

Qiuyang Zheng

September: Galeaspids | News and features | University of Bristol.

There is little doubt now that the paired terrestrial tetrapod limbs, possessed by all terrestrial vertebrates, and those such as whales and turtles that he reverted to a marine existence, evolved out of the paired pectoral and pelvic fins of fish that first crawled onto land. The remaining question was how did these paired limbs evolve in the early fish? Because of gaps in the fossil record, it had looked as though fins suddenly appeared fully formed.

That question has now been answered by an international team, led by Min Zhu of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology, Beijing and Professor Philip Donoghue from the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences, whose discovery shows the primitive condition of paired fins before they separated into pectoral and pelvic fins, the forerunner to arms and legs.

The evidence was found in fossils in the rocks of Hunan Province and Chongqing and named Tujiaaspis after the indigenous Tujia people who live in this region. Unlike previous fossils records which are mostly just the heads, these fossils contain the whole body.

Earlier fossils either had fins or they didn't, with no fossil record of transition to paired fins. That gap has now been filled by Tujiaaspis. There had been a hypothesis that fins probably began as folds but is was just that - a hypothesis awaiting confirmation or falsification. That confirmation has now been provided.

As the press release from the University of Bristol explains:

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Have Reconstructed the Genome of the Earliest Mammalian ancestor

Morganucodon, one of the oldest known mammal-like species

Source: FunkMonk (Michael B. H.), CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons

Revealing the Genome of the Common Ancestor of All Mammals - Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research

The creationist delusion that the Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis, about to be replaced in mainstream biology with their childish, evidence free superstition based on the ludicrous idea that nothing evolves and everything is made by magic, took another blow today when an international team of scientists led by scientists from the University of California Davis and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), Berlin, Germany, published their computed genome of the stem species from which all mammals evolved.

Such a project would not have been mooted had the scientists had the slightest doubt about evolution being the explanation for biodiversity, nor would it have been possible to compute this ancestral genome if the DNA of mammals did not form consistent hierarchy of nested clades resulting in evidence that the genomes of the ancestors of modern mammals form a family tree with a single origin, which lived about 200 million years ago.

The scientists' work is published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

As the scientists explain in the news release from Leibniz-IZW:

Malevolent Designer News - Yet Another SARS-CoV-2 Variant and Another Wave of COVID-19 is On The Way

Big COVID-19 waves may be coming, new Omicron strains suggest | Science | AAAS

According to this article in Science, another wave of COVID-19 infections is on the way because several different sub-strains of the Omicron variant have converged on a similar way to evade the antibodies our immune systems manufacture in response to vaccination and/or infection.

It's not possible to say which of the various emerging strains will come to predominate, but one variant, known as BA.2.75.2, is a likely candidate. It is proving to be especially successful at evading antibodies because changes at half a dozen key sites in its genome that affect the way antibodies bind to the spike proteins on the viral coat, mean the antibodies don't bind very successfully.

Creationism in Crisis - Scientists Show How Large Molecules Self-Assemble - No Gods Required Again

Attraction between the dipoles of several macromolecules leads to their mesomorphic assemblies, in contrast with typical polyelectrolyte behavior.

Credit: Shibananda Das

Game-changing New Theory Upends What We Know About How Charged Macromolecules Self-assemble : UMass Amherst

The recent rum of bad news for Creationism just got worse, with the news that scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered how large molecules such as proteins and DNA can self-assemble with nothing more than the laws of chemistry and physics. As always when one of Creationism's favourite gaps is snapped shut by science, no gods were found and the 'mystery' required nothing more than the operation of the natural laws of chemistry and physics.

In the words of one of the researchers:

The significance of the discovery that dipoles drive the assembly of polymers is immense because it throws new light on one of the fundamental mysteries of life’s processes, [how biological materials know how to self-assemble into coherent, stable structures]. The theory changes the paradigm of how we think about these systems, and highlights the unacknowledged role that dipoles play in the self-assembly of biological materials.

Professor Murugappan Muthukumar, senior author
Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

What is a dipole? Dipole Definition in Chemistry and Physics

As the University of Massachusetts Amherst news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - The Asian Longhorned Ticks Are Spreading Fast in USA

Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis

Longhorned tick discovered in northern Missouri for first time, MU researchers find // Show Me Mizzou // University of Missouri

News today of another stunning triumph for Creationism's malevolent designer!

The Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis is spreading fast in the USA. Worldwide is causes millions of dollars in lost revenue for cattle farmers. It was first reported in New Jersey in 2017 and has now spread to Missouri. The tick is responsible for spreading the organisms that cause bovine theileriosis, which is similar to anaplasmosis in that it causes weight loss, reduced milk yield and death in cattle.

Wikipedia - Theileria

The longhorned tick is closely related to other ticks in the Haemaphysalis genus which are found extensively in Asia and Australasia, all of which can and do transmit bacterial and viral diseases.

I described in The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good how another tick, the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis transmits the disease anaplasmosis in humans by injecting the rickettsia bacterium, Anaplasma phagocytophilum when it bites.

The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good

Map showing the spread of the tick from New Jersey since 2017 (as of July 2022.

Source: Drovers

The spread of this nasty little arachnid has probably been facilitated by two things:

1. Climate change, meaning the warmer temperatures in the US mid-west are creating a more conducive environment for it.
2. the fact that females can breed parthenogenically, meaning they don't need to mate to produce thousands of fertile eggs - all of which are female with the same ability. This mean in a few years, a single female can quickly establish a very large population.

Creationists might like to marvel at that stroke of genius in their putative designer's design for the tick, while wondering how, what is so obviously an advantageous adaptation can be presented as 'devolution', to comply with the latest attempt to replace the failed 'Intelligent [sic] Design' hoax.

The University of Missouri news release explains the problem and how it was discovered:

Evolution News - How The Bird-Hipped Dinosaurs Evolved

Shaking the dinosaur family tree: how did ‘bird-hipped’ dinosaurs evolve?

Two Herrerasaurus chasing a Silesaurus down a stream in the Triassic period. Two Plateosaurus are in the background.

Mohamad Haghani/Stocktrek Images

It's been another terrible week for Creationists.

First there was the news that plants have a ludicrously complex process for correcting the mistakes made when DNA is replicated, and how this shows common descent of plants and animals with the news that this process works when inserted into a human cell. Then there was yet more evidence of the malevolence of any creator who could come up with a design for a trypanosome flagellum that makes it easier for tsetse flies to inject it into us and cause sleeping sickness, and the news that a redesigned fungus is killing the frogs that would eat the mosquitoes that spread malaria. And lastly there is the news that the Theory of Evolution shows no signs of being abandoned as the best explanation for biodiversity but can even be applied to cultures with the finding that chimpanzees, like humans, form different cultural groups.

In fact, of course, most weeks are bad news weeks for Creationists because so many new scientific papers, especially in the fields of biology, archaeology and geology, refute Creationism without even trying, simply because, unlike Creationism, science is firmly grounded in observable and verifiable reality.

Now there is news that scientists from Cambridge University, UK, have shown how a group of dinosaurs, the remote ancestors of modern birds - the bird-hipped dinosaurs - evolved from a 'transitional', i.e., stem group, of dinosaurs, the silesaurs, which had been identified ten years earlier. They have published their finding in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The Cambridge University News release explains how this discovery was made:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Made Tsetse Flies to Pass on Sleeping Sickness

African Sleeping Sickness Microscopic African trypanosomes (left), the parasites that cause African sleeping sickness, are spread by the bite of the tsetse fly (right).

Photo by Nikolay Kolev (left) and Geoffrey Attardo (right)

African sleeping sickness: How the pathogen colonizes t … - LMU Munich

This news item should please devotees of Creationism's putative intelligent [sic] designer, if for no other reason than that it involves a flagellum. Those who fell for Michael J Behe's opening ploy in his intelligent design hoax were fooled into believing that a flagellum is an irreducibly complex structure so must have been designed by an intelligent designer because it could not have evolved by Darwinian gradual evolution.

Of course, Behe ignored the fact that the component parts of the flagellar proton motor pre-existed the flagellum, in the Type II Secretion System, which was a development of the proton pump, so all that was needed was for them to be exapted for a different function, and to give the organism an advantage. It also ignores the fact that there are lots of different flagella found in nature, some with even fewer components than those of E. coli, which he had claimed was the minimum necessary for a functional flagellum. Clearly, if other flagella can work with less components, that of E. Coli is not irreducibly complex

Wikepedia - Type II secretion system

And, unwittingly, Behe gave us the idea of a malevolent designer, because E. coli is much better at making us sick because it has a flagellum, than it would be without it. Given that Creationists believe their putative designer is omniscient, it must have been aware of that when it designed the flagellum.

Anyway, no matter how comprehensively the hoax is refuted, or how malevolent it makes their favourite god look, Creationists will ignore the science and stick with the refuted notion, so those are the people who should be thrilled by this discovery. It is the discovery that the trypanosomes carried by the tsetse fly, which causes sleeping sickness in humans and debilitating diseases in cattle and horses, has a flagellum specially designed to enable the tsetse fly to pass it on in its saliva when it takes a blood meal.

Origins of the English

From Continental Europe to England | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

The Alfred Jewel
Believed to have been commissioned by King Alfred the Great and inscribed "AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN" (Alfred me had made) in the West Saxon dialect.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Where did the English come from?

The answer might surprise those little Englander nationalists who took us out of the European Union, as well as those on the far right who foster daft notions of English racial purity, because even in the Early Middle Ages, the average English person was actually only about 40% Anglo-Saxon, and even that proportion of the 'English' genome came from continental regions bordering the North Sea, including the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. 20%-40% came from what is today Belgium and France. The rest is derived mostly from the indigenous population that was present at the time of the Roman occupation - Brythonic Welsh. The evidence is that the Germanic immigrants sometimes integrated and intermarried in some area, while in other places they formed which might have been an elite upper class.

Grave goods from inhumation grave 3532 at Issendorf cemetery in Lower-Saxony, Germany. Individuals buried at Issendorf cemetery during the Middle Ages are genetically closely related with people who migrated into England during the Anglo-Saxon period.

© Landesmuseum Hannover

The language they brought with them is as comprehensible today to a Dane, a Swede or a Flemish/Dutch speaker as it is to an English speaker, as anyone who has read Beowulf in the original West Saxon dialect of Old English can testify. I once worked with a girl who had been brought up in Norway with a Norwegian mother and an English father. She spoke Swedish, some Danish and a little German in addition to her native Norwegian and English. She could understand parts of Beowulf that I was reading during a coffee break because all the languages she spoke were related to the Germanic West Saxon dialect of Old English, the epic poem was written in.

That fact is confirmed by the work done by the Max Planck Institute and University of Central Lancashire, scientists.

Cultural Evolution - In Chimpanzees

Chimpanzee stone tool diversity | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Female chimpanzee cracking Panda oleosa nuts using a granodiorite hammerstone on a wooden (panda tree root) anvil.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

Archaeologist and primatologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, have discovered cultural differences between different groups of chimpanzees.

Ask any Creationist and they'll assure you that the fact that humans have developed art, music and architecture, to name just a few of our cultural developments, is evidence that there is something very special about humans, showing that we were specially created separate from the rest of 'creation' and given these 'gifts' to enable us to have 'dominion over the planet - which was provided for our benefit.

The problem with that argument from personal incredulity and wishful thinking, is that humans are far from being the only species to have cultures, albeit, our cultural developments of language and writing, combined with our ability to learn and recall facts, and to pass them on to our children, has enabled us to build on out innate ability to form cultural groups, to build advanced cultures. The difference is one of magnitude, not presence/absence. The analogy is with the elephant’s trunk, which is an example of variation on the same basic body plan, and so evidence of common ancestry, not special creation of elephants, although that analogy is probably too subtle for the simple binary thinking of Creationists.

The fact that our cultures have much in common with each other but vary considerably between different geographical groups is evidence of the evolutionary process involved in building those cultures. Sometimes, these cultural variations are very subtle, but most people who have been to other countries will be aware of them, especially with food, drink and language, and with little differences between driving behaviour, as I once showed with a blog post about the difference in driving customs between the UK and Naples, in Italy.

Driving Ethical Evolution

What the scientists at the Max Planck Institute have discovered is that chimpanzees not only use stone tools as hammers to open nuts, but that the stone tool preferred varies between different social groups.

As the Max Planck Institute news release explains:

Malevolent Designer News - Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Killing the Frogs That Help Protect Us from Malaria

Malaria Spike Linked to Amphibian Die-Off | UC Davis

Panamanian golden frog, Atelopus zeteki, a victim of the fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.

On the face of it, there is no connection between frogs and malaria, but scientists have discovered a correlation between the decline of frogs due to the fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, and a spike in malaria cases in parts of Latin America, particularly in Costa Rica and Panama.

Readers may remember how I described the world-wide devastation of amphibian populations with the fungus, B. dendrobatidis (Bd), and how a team of researchers from the University of California at Davis had reported a link between these deaths and an increase in malaria, probably due to this removal from the ecosystem of major predators on mosquitos.

To be a Creationists is to believe this fungus, the effects it is having on global amphibian populations and the knock-on effects this is having on the ecosystem and human health, is the intended outcome of a supernatural intelligent [sic] designer, with this obviously malevolent intent.

Unintelligent Design - God Hates Frogs
Malevolent Designer News - God Doesn't Hate Frogs; He Just Loves Mosquitos and Malaria More.

I also write about this fungus in my popular, illustrated book, The malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, as an example of what can only be described as malevolent intent, if the modification to this otherwise harmless soil fungus to turn it against the world's amphibians, really was the work of Creationists' putative intelligent [sic] designer, as their dogma obliges them to believe.

The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good - Rosa Rubicondior

The mystery, as ever, is why Creationists would prefer us to see their favourite god as a malevolent monster, forever scheming to increase the amount of suffering in the world, rather than ascribe these things to a natural process with no mind or morality involved.

The same UC Davis team has now reported a close correlation between the major die-off of amphibians in Costa Rica and Panama with a spike in malaria cases in the region. At the spike’s peak, up to 1 person per 1,000 annually contracted malaria that normally would not have had the amphibian die-off not occurred, the study found.

According to the UC Davis news release:

Unintelligent Designer News - A Moss RNA Repair Mechanism That also Works in Human Cells

Moss repair team also works in humans — University of Bonn

The editor PPR56, - which only acts in mitochondria in the moss, edits more than 900 different positions in nuclear transcripts in human cells. The size of the respective nucleotide (A, U, C, G) shows how often it occurs at this position of the targets additionally edited by PPR56 in the human transcripts.

© Elena Lesch/University of Bonn

If ever a scientific discovery was designed to embarrass Creationist's, this is it. It is the discovery by scientists at the University of Bonn, Germany, that an RNA editing process which is normally used in plant mitochondria and chloroplasts, works in animal cells, including human cells.

What the scientists discovered is that if they transfer the RNA editing machines PPR56 and PPR65 from moss into human cells, they still work and edit RNA as they would in plants cells.

The process repairs mistakes in the RNA transcribed from the DNA. Although the mistakes are in the RNA, they are correct transcriptions of mistakes in the DNA itself. The mistakes in the DNA are left alone - which means they accumulate over the generations. In animal cells DNA is repaired (albeit imperfectly) when the cell is replicated, but not so in plant mitochondria and chloroplasts.

Now, there may be advantages in allowing mistakes to accumulate over time because this means there are more mutations for natural selection to work on so giving the organelles more evolvability. However, since the transcribed RNA is repaired, this doesn't seem to be an explanation because the resulting proteins will be the same, regardless.

Overview of Transcription - Khan Academy

What plant organelles have ended up with is the equivalent of a master document which it to be photocopied lots of times, but which has spelling mistakes in it. Then, instead of correcting the master copy, each photocopy is scanned for mistakes and corrected, while the mistakes are left in the master copy. When a new master copy is needed, it is made by copying the old master copy, mistakes and all, and any new mistakes intoduced in that process also go unrepaired.

On the face of it, this doesn't seem to be a process that could be described as intelligently designed!

As the University of Bonn news release explains:

Moss repair team also works in humans

Researchers at the University of Bonn transplant RNA editing machine of a moss into human cells

If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: they do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather elaborately in each individual transcript. Researchers at the University of Bonn have transplanted this correction machinery from the moss Physcomitrium patens into human cells. Surprisingly, the corrector started working there too, but according to its own rules. The results have now been published in the journal "Nucleic Acids Research".

In living cells, there is a lot of traffic like on a large construction site: In land plants, blueprints in the form of DNA are stored not only in the cell nucleus, but also in the cell’s power plants (mitochondria) and the photosynthesis units (chloroplasts). These blueprints contain building instructions for proteins that enable metabolic processes. But how is the blueprint information passed on in mitochondria and chloroplasts? This is done by creating transcripts (RNA) of the desired parts of the blueprint. This information is then used to produce the required proteins.

Errors accumulate over time

However, this process does not run entirely smoothly. Over time, mutations have caused errors to accumulate in the DNA that must be corrected in order to obtain perfectly functioning proteins. Otherwise, the energy supply in plants would collapse. At first glance, the correction strategy seems rather bureaucratic: instead of improving the slip-ups directly in the blueprint - the DNA - they are cleaned up in each of the many transcripts by so-called RNA editing processes.

Why living cells make this effort, we do not know. Presumably, these mutations increased as plants spread from water to land during evolution.

Dr. Mareike Schallenberg-Rüdinger, co-senior author
Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany (IZMB)
University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

Compared to letterpress printing, it would be like correcting each individual book by hand, rather than improving the printing plates.

In 2019, the IZMB team led by Prof. Dr. Volker Knoop succeeded in transplanting RNA editing processes from the moss Physcomitrium patens into the bacterium Escherichia coli. It was shown that the repair proteins of the moss can also modify the RNA of these bacteria.

Our results showed that the land plant correction mechanism also works in human cells. This was previously unknown.

Elena Lesch, first author
Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany (IZMB)
University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.

Now, researchers from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany, together with the team led by Prof. Dr. Oliver J. Gruss from the Institute of Genetics at the University of Bonn, have gone one step further: They transferred the RNA editing machinery from the moss into standard human cell lines, including kidney and cancer cells, for example.

But that's not all: the RNA editing machines PPR56 and PPR65, which only act in mitochondria in the moss, also introduce nucleotide changes in RNA transcripts of the cell nucleus in human cells.

More than 900 targets

Surprisingly for the research team, PPR56 makes changes at more than 900 points of attack in human cell targets. In the moss, on the other hand, this RNA corrector is only responsible for two correction sites." There are many more nuclear RNA transcripts in human cells than mitochondrial transcripts in the moss," explains Dr. Mareike Schallenberg-Rüdinger. "As a result, there are also many more targets for the editors to attack." Although the editors follow a particular code, at this stage, it is not yet possible to accurately predict where the editing machines will make changes in human cells.

However, the abundance of RNA editing targets in human cells also offers the opportunity to find out more about the basic mechanisms of the correctors in further studies. This could be the basis for methods of inducing a very specific change in RNA in human cells by means of a corrector. "If we could correct faulty sites in the genetic code with RNA editing methods, this would potentially also offer starting points for the treatment of hereditary diseases," says Schallenberg-Rüdinger, looking to the future. "Whether that will work remains to be seen."

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The team have published their findings in an open access paper in the journal Nucleic Acids Research:

Abstract

RNA editing processes are strikingly different in animals and plants. Up to thousands of specific cytidines are converted into uridines in plant chloroplasts and mitochondria whereas up to millions of adenosines are converted into inosines in animal nucleo-cytosolic RNAs. It is unknown whether these two different RNA editing machineries are mutually incompatible. RNA-binding pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins are the key factors of plant organelle cytidine-to-uridine RNA editing. The complete absence of PPR mediated editing of cytosolic RNAs might be due to a yet unknown barrier that prevents its activity in the cytosol. Here, we transferred two plant mitochondrial PPR-type editing factors into human cell lines to explore whether they could operate in the nucleo-cytosolic environment. PPR56 and PPR65 not only faithfully edited their native, co-transcribed targets but also different sets of off-targets in the human background transcriptome. More than 900 of such off-targets with editing efficiencies up to 91%, largely explained by known PPR-RNA binding properties, were identified for PPR56. Engineering two crucial amino acid positions in its PPR array led to predictable shifts in target recognition. We conclude that plant PPR editing factors can operate in the entirely different genetic environment of the human nucleo-cytosol and can be intentionally re-engineered towards new targets.

Graphical Abstract

Plant mitochondrial PPR-DYW deaminase specifically edits cytidines in nuclear-cytosolic transcripts in human cells. The editing enzyme can be re-directed to new targets via modification of single binding motifs.

Elena Lesch, Maximilian T Schilling, Sarah Brenner, Yingying Yang, Oliver J Gruss, Volker Knoop, Mareike Schallenberg-Rüdinger
Plant mitochondrial RNA editing factors can perform targeted C-to-U editing of nuclear transcripts in human cells
Nucleic Acids Research, 2022;, gkac752, https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac752

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

This raises several problems for Creationists, especially those who believe an intelligent [sic] designer is responsible for these processes:

1. Why is this not evidence of a common origin of plants and animals?
2. Why would an intelligently designed process by an omnipotent, omniscient designer result in mistakes that need repairing?
3. Why would an intelligent designer use such an unncessarily complicated process to correct the mistakes in DNA replication when it uses a simpler process in animal cells, which doesn't mean mistakes continue to accumulate in the Genome?
4. If there are no advantages in carrying out the repair at the RNA level instead of at the DNA level, why 'design' two different processes to achieve the same result?
5. If there are advantages, why not use the advantageous process for animals as well as plant organelles?

No doubt all those problems will be waved aside with the ultimate in non-answer, "God works in mysterious ways!", whilst still insisting that intelligent [sic] design is real science, not religion in a lab coat.

Environment News - How Many Ants Are There?

Ants following a scent trail

Earth harbours 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants – and they weigh more than wild birds and mammals combined

Many years ago, when I was a medical research technician for Oxford University, the lab I worked in suddenly had a problem with tiny yellow ants that were all over the place, so we called in a university entomologist. He identified them as pharaoh ants, a recently introduced species to the UK that was thriving in centrally-heated buildings.

We weren’t the only department with the problem because, as he explained, there was a large colony of possibly a billion individual ants somewhere in underground heating system that piped heating from a central boiler room serving many different buildings behind the Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museums, but they were harmless anyway, although it wasn't pleasant to find they'd discovered your pack of sandwiches and had laid a trail to it along which thousands were now streaming in a thin yellow line, carrying your lunch away, crumb by crumb. They especially liked ham, but wouldn't turn down cheese or egg.

We used to have a bit of fun with them, being research biologists. We would place a strip of paper across their trail and wait until they had found their way across it to pick up their trail on the other side and laid a new connecting scent trail on the paper, then we would move the paper several inches sideways and watch as they explored the paper to discover the trail across it now several inches away, cross it and then explore to find the old trail. Then we would remove the paper and watch as they still followed along where the edges of the paper strip had been to where the trail used to cross the paper strip, lay a new trail and follow back along what had been the edge of the paper to pick up their old trail. Sometimes an enterprising scout would find a shortcut and establish a new trail. In this way, we could create a complicated zig-zag trail and make them work for their free lunch! It would take them several hours to re-establish a shorter trail.

Incidentally, this also proved they were laying a trail of some sort. The trail could also be washed away with an alcohol swab, showing it was almost certainly a chemical of some sort.

But enough about the fun we had with our resident pharaoh ants.

Our billion-strong colony was a mere speck in the ocean, according to research by an Australian team. They have conservatively estimated that there are about 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any one time - that's 20 followed by 15 zeros. Each of those ants will have about 250,000 brain cells alone and probably ten times as many other cells in their body. Each cell will contain hundreds, maybe thousands of proteins, each of which will need to be folded precisely to function correctly.

One of the tricks Creationists frauds fool their dupes with is to calculate how many different ways a protein can be folded then pretend to have estimated the chance of it being folded in exactly the right way to be vanishingly small, then hit their credulous audience with a false dichotomy fallacy and claim this proves the locally popular god must have arranged it.

Really? for every one of those sextillions of proteins in every one of those cells in all 20 quadrillion ants? And then there are the countless trillions of cells in other species! No wonder it doesn't have time to prevent children dying of malaria, AIDS or starvation in Africa!

You see, we can all play the big scary number tactic! But isn't it much more likely that the way proteins are folded is a function of the way they are manufactured by a cell, using nothing more complicated than the laws of chemistry and physics, than that it was all done by which ever deity the frauds are pushing, the existence of which and its modus operandum have never been demonstrated or witnessed?

So, leaving that major problem for Creations aside, how was the number, 20 quadrillion, arrived at for the Earthly population of ants, which incidentally means their combined weight of dry carbon is about 12 million tonnes, which exceeds that of all birds and mammals combined! The authors explain their methodology in an open access article in The Conversation, reprinted below under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

Earth harbours 20,000,000,000,000,000 ants – and they weigh more than wild birds and mammals combined

Shutterstock

Mark Wong, The University of Western Australia; Benoit Guénard, University of Hong Kong; François Brassard, Charles Darwin University; Patrick Schultheiss, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg; Runxi Wang, University of Hong Kong, and Sabine Nooten, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg
Have you ever wondered exactly how many ants live on Earth? Possibly not, but it’s certainly a question we’ve asked ourselves.

Our research published today provides an approximate answer. We conservatively estimate our planet harbours about 20 quadrillion ants. That’s 20 thousand million millions, or in numerical form, 20,000,000,000,000,000 (20 with 15 zeroes).

We further estimate the world’s ants collectively constitute about 12 million tonnes of dry carbon. This exceeds the mass of all the world’s wild birds and wild mammals combined. It’s also equal to about one-fifth of the total weight of humans.

Eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson once said insects and other invertebrates are “the little things that run the world” – and he was right. Ants, in particular, are a crucial part of nature. Among other roles, ants aerate the soil, disperse seeds, break down organic material, create habitat for other animals and form an important part of the food chain.

Estimating ant numbers and mass provides an important baseline from which to monitor ant populations amid worrying environmental changes.

Many ant species are important seed dispersers. Here, two worker Meranoplus ants carry a seed back to their nest.

Credit: Francois Brassard

Counting the world’s ants

There are more than 15,700 named species and subspecies of ants, and many others not yet named by science. Ants’ high degree of social organisation has enabled them to colonise nearly all ecosystems and regions around the globe.

The astounding ubiquity of ants has prompted many naturalists to contemplate their exact number on Earth. But these were basically educated guesses. Systematic, evidence-based estimates have been lacking.

Our research involved an analysis of 489 studies of ant populations conducted by fellow ant scientists from around the world. This included non-English literature, in languages such as Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin and Portuguese.

The research spanned all continents and major habitats including forests, deserts, grasslands and cities. They used standardised methods for collecting and counting ants such as pitfall traps and leaf litter samples. As you can imagine, this is often tedious work.

In defence of ants

A researcher installs a pitfall trap, a standard method for collecting ants that crawl across the ground surface.

Credit: Francois Brassard

From all this, we estimate there are approximately 20 quadrillion ants on Earth. This figure, though conservative, is between two and 20 times higher than previous estimates.

The previous figures employed a “top-down” approach by assuming ants comprise about 1% of the world’s estimated insect population. In contrast, our “bottom-up” estimate is more reliable because it uses data on ants observed directly in the field and makes fewer assumptions.

Our next step was to work out how much all these ants weigh. The mass of organisms is typically measured in terms of their carbon makeup. We estimated that 20 quadrillion average-sized ants corresponds to a dry weight or “biomass” of approximately 12 million tonnes of carbon.

This is more than the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals – and about 20% of total human biomass.

Carbon makes up about half the dry weight of an ant. If the weight of other bodily elements was included, the total mass of the world’s ants would be higher still.

We also found ants are distributed unevenly on Earth’s surface. They vary sixfold between habitats and generally peak in the tropics. This underscores the importance of tropical regions in maintaining healthy ant populations.

Ants were also particularly abundant in forests, and surprisingly, in arid regions. But they become less common in human-made habitats.

Our findings come with a few caveats. For example, the sampling locations in our dataset are unevenly distributed across geographic regions. And the vast majority of samples were collected from the ground layer, meaning we have very little information about ant numbers in trees or underground. This means our findings are somewhat incomplete.

Where are all the ants? World-first ‘treasure map’ reveals hotspots for rare species

The new research found ants are distributed unevenly on Earth’s surface.

Credit: Shutterstock

We all need ants

Ants also provide vital “ecosystem services” for humans. For instance, a recent study found ants can be more effective than pesticides at helping farmers produce food.

Ants have also developed tight interactions with other organisms – and some species cannot survive without them.

For example, some birds rely on ants to flush out their prey. And thousands of plant species either feed or house ants in exchange for protection, or dispersal of their seeds. And many ants are predators, helping to keep populations of other insects in check.

A purple Rhytidoponera ant carries her prey between her jaws. Many ants serve as predators that help keep populations of other insects in check.

Credit: Francois Brassard

Alarmingly, global insect numbers are declining due to threats such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, chemical use, invasive species and climate change.

But data on insect biodiversity is alarmingly scarce. We hope our study provides a baseline for further research to help fill this gap.

It’s in humanity’s interest to monitor ant populations. Counting ants is not difficult, and citizen scientists from all over the world could help investigate how these important animals are faring at a time of great environmental change.

Why tiny ants have invaded your house, and what to do about it

Mark Wong, Forrest Fellow, The University of Western Australia;
Benoit Guénard, Associate professor, University of Hong Kong;
François Brassard, PhD candidate, Charles Darwin University;
Patrick Schultheiss, Temporary Principal Investigator, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg;
Runxi Wang, PhD candidate, University of Hong Kong,
and Sabine Nooten, Temporary Principal Investigator, Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The team have published their findings in the journal PNAS. Although the main body of thr paper is behind a paywall, the abstract is pubished open access:

Significance

The astounding ubiquity of ants has prompted many naturalists to contemplate their exact number on Earth, but systematic and empirically derived estimates are lacking. Integrating data from all continents and major biomes, we conservatively estimate 20 × 1015 (20 quadrillion) ants on Earth, with a total biomass of 12 megatons of dry carbon. This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass. Ant abundance is distributed unevenly on Earth, peaking in the tropics and varying sixfold among habitats. Our global map of ant abundance expands our understanding of the geography of ant diversity and provides a baseline for predicting ants’ responses to worrying environmental changes that currently impact insect biomass.

Abstract

Knowledge on the distribution and abundance of organisms is fundamental to understanding their roles within ecosystems and their ecological importance for other taxa. Such knowledge is currently lacking for insects, which have long been regarded as the “little things that run the world”. Even for ubiquitous insects, such as ants, which are of tremendous ecological significance, there is currently neither a reliable estimate of their total number on Earth nor of their abundance in particular biomes or habitats. We compile data on ground-dwelling and arboreal ants to obtain an empirical estimate of global ant abundance. Our analysis is based on 489 studies, spanning all continents, major biomes, and habitats. We conservatively estimate total abundance of ground-dwelling ants at over 3 × 1015 and estimate the number of all ants on Earth to be almost 20 × 1015 individuals. The latter corresponds to a biomass of ∼12 megatons of dry carbon. This exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and is equivalent to ∼20% of human biomass. Abundances of ground-dwelling ants are strongly concentrated in tropical and subtropical regions but vary substantially across habitats. The density of leaf-litter ants is highest in forests, while the numbers of actively ground-foraging ants are highest in arid regions. This study highlights the central role ants play in terrestrial ecosystems but also major ecological and geographic gaps in our current knowledge. Our results provide a crucial baseline for exploring environmental drivers of ant-abundance patterns and for tracking the responses of insects to environmental change.

Schultheiss, Patrick; Nooten, Sabine S.; Wang, Runxi; Wong, Mark K. L.; Brassard, François; Guénard, Benoit

The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022) 119(40); e2201550119; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2201550119

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by PNAS
. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND)

With the exception of a few nasty ants such as the vicious bullet and fire ants, most species are harmless and even beneficial. In the UK we have the very common black garden ant that, when the conditions are right in Spring and Summer - the right humidity and a high pressure weather system to help with flying - have a nuptial flight when the winged unmated females and smaller males all take flight at the same time from several different nests in the area. The males pursue the female, and the winner gets to mate with her. He then dies, as do all the others who lost the race. The female lands, sheds her wings and looks for somewhere to build a nest and start a new colony. This gives rise to panic and complaints about an invasion of 'flying ants', and the hardware shops have a run on ant power. One very silly neighbour we once had used to spray ant powder along our adjoining fence because she believed all the ants in her garden had come from ours! People even pour boiling water on them!

And yet these are harmless unless you annoy them then they can give a mild sting, more like a pinprick, really. They are incredibly useful in gardens where they account for thousands of caterpillars. Please treat them with respect. If they do come into your house, look upon them as cleaners because they'll be finding food crumbs and spilt sugar, etc. Keeping the floor and surfaces clean, and keeping food covered in sealed containers, will mean you won't get visits.

We need our ants - all 20 quadrillion of them!

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Thank you for sharing!

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Evolution News - How Our Gut Microbes Have Co-Evolved With Us.

Gut microbes spread over the globe along with humans.

© MPI for Biology, Tübingen

Gut microbes and humans on a joint evolutionary journey | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

When non-African humans came out of Africa, we didn't come alone. In addition to our ectoparasites such as lice, fleas, bedbugs, etc, we also brought some more fellow travellers. We brought our gut microbiota along with us.

And, like us, they have continued to evolve and diversify, co-evolving in lockstep with us, according to the findings by a group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany and several research institutes at the University of Tübingen, Germany. By constructing phylogenetic trees for both us and 59 species of microbes found in our gut biota, they showed that there is a close match between theirs and our trees. The more dependent the species of microbe is on us, the more closely our trees match.

This will shock Creationists, but they also found that the more dependent on us our microbes have become, the smaller their genomes. In other words, their evolution has been by loss of genetic information, similar to what we see in other obligate parasites such as parasitic worms. So close is the match for some microbes that it prompted one of the researchers to remark that they behave like part of the human genome.

According to the Max Planck Institute’s press release:

Evolution News - Earliest Vertebrate Heart From 380 Million Years Ago.

We found the oldest ever vertebrate fossil heart. It tells a 380 million-year-old story of how our bodies evolved

Although they probably don’t realise it, the function of the heart is as good evidence as it gets that the Bible wasn't written or inspired by the god described in it. No such omnipotent creator god would have assumed the heart was the seat of emotions when in fact it's simply a muscular pump for circulating blood around the body. Such silly mistakes are understandable if the Bible was written by ignorant people who lacked even basis science, of course, but not for any alleged creator of all life, including mammalian.

So, news that scientists have discovered the earliest fossil record of a mammalian heart from 380 million years ago, will come as a shock to Bible literalist creationists, if for no other reason than that it refutes the childish notion that the Universe was created by a creator god just a few thousand years ago, and the same creator created the human heart as the seat of emotion.

And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

Mark 11: 22-23

The scientists who made the discovery have published their findings in the journal, Science and have written about them in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here, formatted for stylistic consistency, under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be read here.

Climate Emergency News - How Mangrove Swamps Capture Atmospheric Carbon

Mexican mangroves have been capturing carbon for 5,000 years | News

Researcher entering BCS mangroves

Credit: Ramiro Arcos Aguilar

At the moment, we, and the planet we're floating in space on, need all the friends we can get, and few are more useful to us that the world's mangrove swamps. With humans releasing carbon into the atmosphere from fossils fuels as quickly as we can dig the stuff up or extract it from the geology, our friendly mangrove swamps are locking it back into the soil as quickly as they can bury the organic matter some of it is turned into. It can't count for all of it, of course, but every little helps.

And a team of scientists from the University of California Riverside (UCR) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD), have shown that it can stay locked up for 5,000 years, provided we keep the swamps alive and processing it. If not, it'll be released back into the atmosphere, with possibly catastrophic results.

Mangroves are higly specialised plants that can live and thrive in salt and brackish water subject to tidal changes, and with their roots in anoxic mud that would prevent most other plants from obtaining nutrients. Mangroves can quickly colonise these estuarine and coastal mudflats with a simple trick - their relatively large seed start to germinate and produce a long, pointed root while they are still attached to the parent plant. When they are released, they fall straight down to the soft mud and the root becomes embedded, in effect planting itself. It then produces the leaf-bearing stems which send down ariel roots, with air tubes like snorkels, into the mud to provide the oxygen the feeding roots need in the anoxic mud.

Mangrove forests - Wikipedia.

The presence of these dense 'forests' of mangroves slows down the flow of water and causes more mud and floating plant matter to be deposited, so the swap deepens and extends over time, if left undisturbed. But it's what gets locked up in the mud that is the important thing from the point of view of Earth's carbon cycle. Because of the lack of oxygen, bacterial activity is low, giving rise to peat-like layers of plant matter, which decays at almost negligible rate.

The scientists have shown that the carbon locked up in this peat remains there for about 5000 years, as the University of California - Riverside news release explains:

Mangroves in Baja California.

Credit: Matthew Costa/UCSD

The team expected that carbon would be found in the layer of peat beneath the forest, but they did not expect that carbon to be 5,000 years old. This result, along with a description of the microbes they identified, is now published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

What’s special about these mangrove sites isn’t that they’re the fastest at carbon storage, but that they have kept the carbon for so long. It is orders of magnitude more carbon storage than most other ecosystems in the region.

Emma Aronson, senior co-author
Environmental microbiologist
University of California Riverside,
Riverside, California, USA

Peat underlying the mangrove trees is a combination of submerged sediment and partially decayed organic matter. In some areas sampled for this study, the peat layer extended roughly 10 feet below the coastal water line.

Unusual roots of the mangroves.

Credit: Matthew Costa/UCSD

Little oxygen makes it to the deepest peat layer, which is likely why the team did not find any fungi living in it; normally fungi are found in nearly every environment on Earth. However, oxygen is a requirement for most fungi that specialize in breaking down carbon compounds. The team may explore the absence of fungi further in future mangrove peat studies.

There are more than 1,100 types of bacteria living beneath the mangroves that consume and excrete a variety of chemical elements. Many of them function in extreme environments with low or no oxygen. However, these bacteria are not efficient at breaking down carbon.

These sites are protecting carbon that has been there for millennia. Disturbing them would cause a carbon emission that we wouldn’t be able to repair any time soon.

If we let these forests keep functioning, they can retain the carbon they’ve sequestered out of our atmosphere, essentially permanently. These mangroves have an important role in mitigating climate change.

Matthew Costa, first author
Coastal ecologist
University of California San Diego
San Diego, California, USA.

The deeper you go into the peat soils, the fewer microorganisms you find. Not much can break down the carbon down there, or the peat itself, for that matter. Because it persists for so long, it’s not easy to make more of it or replicate the communities of microbes within it.

Mia Maltz, co-author
Microbial ecologist
University of California Riverside,
Riverside, California, USA

There are other ecosystems on Earth known to have similarly aged or even older carbon. Arctic or Antarctic permafrost, where the ice hasn’t yet thawed allowing a release of gases, are examples. Potentially, other mangrove forests as well. The researchers are now scouting mangrove research sites in Hawaii, Florida and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as well.

Carbon dioxide increases the greenhouse effect that is causing the planet to heat up. Costa believes that one way to keep this issue from worsening is to leave mangroves undisturbed.

The abstract to the team's open access paper in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series, gives more technical details:

ABSTRACT: Mangroves provide important ecosystem services, including storing carbon belowground for millennia. Mangrove carbon storage relies in part on high primary productivity, but essential to the long-lived nature of this storage is the slow rate of microbial decomposition of peat. In this study, we (1) examined how carbon and nitrogen densities and microbial community composition vary with peat age and (2) describe the formation of peat deposits over time. At 4 mangrove sites near La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, we cored the sediments until rejection and obtained 5 cm samples at 20 cm intervals. In these samples, we measured organic carbon (C_org), total nitrogen, δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, and radiocarbon (¹⁴C) age. We observed peat carbon densities of 3.4 × 10-2 ± 0.2 × 10-2 g cm-3, C_org:N ratios of 42 ± 3, and inter-site variation in C_org:N that reflects differing preservation conditions. Recalcitrant organic matter sources and anaerobic conditions leave a strong imprint on peat microbial communities. Microbial community composition and diversity were driven by depth and sediment characteristics, including C_org:N ratio and ¹⁴C age. Carbon dating allowed us to reconstruct the accumulation of organic matter over the last 5029 ± 85 yr. Even over this long time scale, though microbes have evidently continuously cycled the peat nitrogen pool, peat carbon density remains effectively unchanged.

Costa MT, Ezcurra E, Aburto-Oropeza O, Maltz M, Arogyaswamy K, Botthoff J, Aronson E (2022)
Baja California Sur mangrove deep peat microbial communities cycle nitrogen but do not affect old carbon pool.
Mar Ecol Prog Ser 695:15-31. DOI: 10.3354/meps14117

Copyright: © 2022 The authors. Published by Inter-Research Science Publishers. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Although mangrove forests alone can't solve the mess we've made of the planet, they help, and destroying them would be catastrophic, so we have to do all we can to protect and encourage them, as though our lives depend on it, because they do, and so do the lives of our children, grandchildren and future generations.

There is no planet B!

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