They are released to create and manage its relationships. These complex chemicals are pumped into the zone immediately surrounding the plant’s roots, which is called the rhizosphere. Why do they do it? The answer unlocks the gate to a secret garden. Making such chemicals requires energy and resources, so this looks like pouring money down the drain. Stranger still, before releasing them, they turn some of these sugars into compounds of tremendous complexity. They deliberately pump them into the ground. Plants release into the soil between 11% and 40% of all the sugars they make through photosynthesis. Let’s start with something that flips our understanding of how we survive. The soil becomes sodden, airless and compacted.ī ut none of the above captures the true wonder of soil. Under certain conditions, when farmers apply nitrogen fertiliser, the microbes respond by burning through the carbon: in other words, the cement that holds their catacombs together. It also reveals why soil can break down so quickly when it’s farmed. This biological structure helps to explain soil’s resistance to droughts and floods: if it were just a heap of matter, it would be swept away. Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. Soil is fractally scaled, which means its structure is consistent, regardless of magnification. The tiny clumps they build become the blocks the animals in the soil use to construct bigger labyrinths. Microbes make cements out of carbon, with which they stick mineral particles together, creating pores and passages through which water, oxygen and nutrients pass. But it turns out to be a biological structure, built by living creatures to secure their survival, like a wasps’ nest or a beaver dam. Most people see it as a dull mass of ground-up rock and dead plants. That this thin cushion between rock and air can withstand all we throw at it and still support us is a dangerous beliefīut even more arresting than soil’s diversity and abundance is the question of what it actually is. After two hours examining a kilogram of soil, I realised I had seen more of the major branches of the animal kingdom than I would on a week’s safari in the Serengeti. It was a bristletail, or dipluran.Īs I worked my way through the lump, again and again I found animals whose existence, despite my degree in zoology and a lifetime immersed in natural history, had been unknown to me. I spotted something that might have stepped out of a Japanese anime: long and low, with two fine antennae at the front and two at the back, poised and sprung like a virile dragon or a flying horse. What I took to be a tiny white centipede turned out, when I looked it up, to be a different life form altogether, called a symphylid. Then I began to see creatures I had never encountered before. Round, crabby mites were everywhere: in some soils there are half a million in every square metre. I immediately saw springtails – tiny animals similar to insects – in dozens of shapes and sizes. As soon as I found the focal length, it burst into life. To leave the bathroom, place the key into the panel on the door and reposition the blocks so that the key overlaps the green lock.When I first examined a lump of soil with a powerful lens, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. Once completed, the cabinet underneath the sink will open and you can grab the key to the bathroom door, but you aren’t quite free yet. Position the arrows to match the eyes and nose of the pumpkin. Take the lightbulb and insert it into the pumpkin, revealing the final arrow puzzle combination.Go back to the mirror and click on the picture frame at the bottom of the floor. Notice the dots and lines? Match them with the arrows.
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