Leisha except from the Human Microbiome Course Manual
This is one of my favorite stories because you know the story. You already know what I’m going to tell you… I’m just going to bring it to your attention. Some of the words you might not understand yet, but you will understand the concept.
Let me take you back to a time, before our time… when things grew naturally in nature, in a pristine environment, where there was nothing added and nothing lost. It was a perfect orchestration of God’s creation! You had over 35,000 different bacteria in the soil and 5,000 fungi. You had the Biogeochemical Cycles: the hydro-logic cycle, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the sulfur cycle, the phosphate cycle, the mineral cycle, the telluric current cycle, the silica cycle, and the alumina cycle.
Then you had your plants doing the majority of photosynthesis: 6 parts carbon in > 6 parts oxygen out > 1-part sugar. The larger trees and plants were donating polysaccharides (sugars) to the smaller plants for the complex process of converting an inorganic mineral into a usable form. These sugars would go down into the roots and mix with the 35,000 bacteria, 5,000 fungi, and carbon from the atmosphere in order to encapsulate a metallic carbon, forming an organic (plant-derived) mineral. Only a land plant when the Biogeochemical cycles and everything is intact can convert an inorganic mineral into this bioavailable form.
Then you have what is called the fungal hyphae, which is the “wood wide web,” and that is the connection which links this symbiotic relationship all together. Here is where the carrots love tomatoes, peas loved corn, spinach loved apple trees, etc. If a tree were to get hit by lightning and loose its top half, the fungal hyphae says, “Hey! Homeboy got hit with lightning over here. He isn’t going to be able to produce any polysaccharides. He is gonna go down… He has a whole group of trees (brothers over here) intertwined in his roots. If we lose him, we are going to lose this whole section over here! So, we are going to donate polysaccharides to this stump, in order to keep it alive because we need its root matrix.”
So, in this symbiotic relationship, there was nothing added and nothing lost. A plant would bring up inorganic minerals and convert it to a usable form (organic mineral). The plant would mulch itself and the humic acid in the soil would contribute to the decomposition process, changing it back to inorganic. The plant would bring it back up again, turn it into food (organic mineral). An animal would eat it then excrete it, back to inorganic. A plant would bring it back up, an animal would eat it. Once the animal dies, it goes back to inorganic all over again.
Every breath, every urination, every feces, every corpse, everything was recycled and there was nothing else to be added and nothing was ever lost! It was a perfect orchestration of God’s creation. Everything lives symbiotically, you had the “wood wide web”, the biogeochemical cycles, the fungal hyphae, the biota, the plants and animals in specific regions, you had your biosphere (the inhabitable portion of the atmosphere) which includes the atmosphere, ecosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere, in other words ecosystem… and in this perfect orchestration there was nothing added and nothing lost. Do you get that picture?
