Living Smoke
Texas
high school student Sara Mims looked through her
microscope at particles she had trapped from the
air. She was trying to capture dust and fungal
spores from a Saharan wind event across the
globe. What she saw changed the trajectory of
her high school science project. “I didn’t know
what I was looking at. I was a high school
student, not a microbiologist,” says Mims.
It
was only after checking satellite images and
seeing large smoke plumes arriving from fires
across the Gulf of Mexico that she realized she
was seeing charred material along with fungal
spores. She found that she could trap and
culture more fungal spores in smoky rather than
clear air. This and other clever experiments led
Mims and her research assistant — her dad — to
propose that fire-generated air currents carry
living microbes.
Surprisingly,
Mims’s findings lay dormant for over a decade
after she published them back in 2004.
Nevertheless, her experiments are the first
example of a growing field of research called
pyroaerobiology, which lies at the intersection
of fire ecology, atmospheric science, and
microbiology. It’s the study of smoke-borne
bacteria, fungi, and other microbes: who they
are, where they go, and what they do when they
get there. Pyroaerobiology stems from the
observation that wildfire smoke is — in a sense
— alive, which has implications for human health
and the environment. And it’s growing even more
critical with the increasing frequency, size,
and intensity of wildfires.
Journalist
and microbiologist Anna Marija Helt writes about
the ecological footprint of wildfire smoke in
this online
exclusive.
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