‘Sound bathing’ can benefit more than just humans, with a study from an Australian university finding even microorganisms enjoy white noise that can help restore degraded landscapes.
Scientists at Flinders University in Adelaide have been using soundwaves to aid ecosystem recovery in soil, with work led by microbial ecologist Jake Robinson to demonstrate the effects of sound on the speed of growth and sporulation of plant growth-promoting fungus.
Sporulation is not a reproductive process, but a mechanism bacteria and microorganisms use to survive tougher conditions.
A global United Nations initiative – the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 – forecasts that 75% of the world’s soils described as degradation could increase to more than 90% by 2050, meaning work could be useful in reversing damage and increasing biodiversity.
The fungus trichoderma harzianum was selected for the latest study because of its known beneficial effects on plants, such as disease protection, plant growth, and improved nutrient utilisation. In agriculture, it has been shown to parasitise other fungi which are often plant pathogens, the university said.
Robinson’s work will be published in an article in Biology Letters Wednesday.
“In our experiments, we show that the acoustic stimulation resulted in increased fungal biomass and enhanced trichoderma harzianum spore activity compared to controls,” he wrote.
Prior work found white noise, in this case a monotone set at 80 decibel sound pressure, increased a similar response in the soil bacteria E. Coli. This is basically the sound of an empty radio signal.
“We strive to find novel ways to speed up and improve levels of beneficial fungi and other microbes in degraded soils. It could have wide-ranging benefits for restoring degraded landscapes and farming land to feed the world,” Robinson wrote.
The next step will be study the benefits of various microbial growth on plant health, and then scale things up outside of the laboratory.
By Helen Clark – helen@carbon-pulse.com
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