Reason #47 to Talk Soils with your Students

If you are a person that falls into the center of a Venn Diagram with one circle representing RadioLab listeners and the other representing people that watched/attended the 2015 KABT Fall Meeting, you might have already made this connection. If you are not if you fit into this Venn Diagram at all, please do yourself a favor and check out this, and this, and this, and also this… I can wait.

Are you back? Pretty neat, right?

Radiolab’s latest podcast is one of their best (soils bias showing here a bit) and deals with the importance of fungal communities to plant productivity and ecosystem health. It isn’t particularly long, so I intend to use it as homework, or an activity for a rainy day in case one of my sections somehow gets way ahead of the others. #WoodWideWeb 😂

At our 2015 Fall Conference, we had presentations from KU researchers Dr. Ben Sikes and Dr. Peggy Schultz that really lit a fire under the people in attendance. Their research deals with some of the myriad ecological applications of fungi in prairie ecosystems.  I think you will notice some crossover here, which is pretty cool. Dr. Schultz’s talk is especially linked to the information in the podcast, and does a good job of touching on the science of how the AMF (mycorrhizae) function. Here is video from their talks.

Dr. Peggy Schultz (Kansas Biological Survey) beginning at 00:42:15.

Dr. Ben Sikes (Kansas Biological Survey)

Where might this fit into your classes? Is this information an addition to your ecology unit? Or do you work it in when you talk fungi and/or classification? If you have more time to devote to soils and fungal-plant mutualism (environment science and field biology classes?), you might contact the two KU researchers; both labs do a really great job of outreach to classroom teachers and students. You can find their contact information here.

Effect of AMF on Growth in Grass Species. Figure courtesy Dr. Dan Carter http://sewrpc.academia.edu/DanielCarter

Not sure where this fits into your class, but want to try? Post a question in the comments or in our Facebook group and let’s have the Hivemind work on it! And let us know if you picked up on the hidden reference to the RadioLab podcast.