| Microorganisms | Taxonomy | Habitat |
| Fungi | Viruses | Bacteria |
|
Microorganisms are very tiny one-celled organisms, viruses, fungi, and bacteria, and are found everywhere in the world. They are found in all living things, plants and animal. There are more microorganisms on and inside your body than there are cells that make up your entire body. Microorganisms can live in the air, on land, and in fresh or salt water environments. Some of them, pathogens, can be harmful and causes diseases, but there are some microorganisms that are needed for living things to survive.
|
|||
| Land Microbes | |||
 |
All of the living things, plant and animal, in earth's environmental communities of forests, deserts, tundra, water, air, and all of the rest depend on the cryptobiotic crust or microbiotic layer in the soil. This is the layer of soil that most microbes live in. These microbe communities are made up of fungi, cyanobacteria and lichens. They look like a grayish cover on the ground when they are first forming, but do form in clumps of lichen that look like little hills after about 50 years of growth. | ||
| The cyanobacteria Nostoc lives on the land and forms in filaments of hyphae that hold the microbial mat of lichen together. |  |
||
| The cyanobacteria called Nostoc helps lichen produce food during photosynthesis. | |||
 |
 |
||
| Microbial
Crust The microbial crust found in the desert is all dried up for most of the year. All it takes is a little bit of water to make it active again. |
 |
This is the microbial crust from the picture to the left after it was put in water. The arrows are pointing to a kind of lichen in this section, another form of lichen is inside the square, and cyanobacgteria are inside the circle. | |
| Airborne Microbes | |||
| Airborne microbes cause a lot of illnesses and diseases in humans. Microorganisms can enter the air when a human or animal sneezes, or by the wind picking up the light particles and blowing them where humans are. When a human sneezes microorganisms leave the lungs at around 200 miles per hour. Some of the microorganisms that are growing in the mucus in the respiratory tract enter the air with the moisture particles that are sneezed out of the lungs. These microorganisms can be breathed into the lungs of another person and that person could get sick. | |||
 |
|||
| How are microorganisms identified? | |||
|
Microorganisms are put into groups, but a lot of microorganisms can belong to more than one group. One way that microorganisms are grouped is by the temperature in their environment. Another way to organize microorganisms is by placing them in either the prokaryot or eukaryot group. |
|||
| How do microorganisms reproduce?? | |||
| Thermophiles reproduce either by sexual or asexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction requires a male and female organism, but asexual reproduction happens by cell division, mitosis. Thermophilic fungi reproduce by producing male and female spores that come in contact with each other to produce a new organism. | |||
| What do microorganisms do? | |||
|
|
|||
| Microorganisms also are responsible for building fertile soil for plants to grow in. Microbes stick to the roots of plants and decompose dead organic matter into food for the plant to absorb. The plants that live and grow because of the microorganisms that live on them make a home for other animals to live in. Some microorganisms make people, animals, and plants sick, but others make people well and kill the bacteria on plants that make them sick. Drug companies that make medicines use hundreds of different microorganisms to make medicines that will help cure diseases. Human waste products are broken down into safer particles by some microorganism. Scientists are always looking for new ways to use microbes, and only a few uses have been listed here. | |||
|
Photographic
Citations: The
Microbial World: |
|||
