r/plantScience

Hi there! I’m not sure if this is the right place to put this but im trying to figure out what i want to do in college. I want to either do soil/plant science or horticulture, but im having a hard time narrowing it down to one of those. I like the thought of working at a plant nursery, plant breeding, checking someones soil to see if its good, solving diseases, and things along that line. The thing is that I dont know where that falls into and I was wondering if anyone could help me?

I collected intact samples of Vymara’s root zone, including the surrounding moss and substrate, and used them to build several small microcosms in the lab. Vymara is photosynthetic. Chlorophyll-fluorescence measurements confirm active photosystem II. But its rapid growth and nutrient uptake still do not make sense for the poor substrate it grows in. I tested whether the surrounding biological layer might be contributing to its nutrition.

I introduced a controlled amount of commercially sourced mammalian blood into one microcosm. The others received water, saline, glucose solution or nitrogen-matched plant tissue. Within hours, protease and phosphatase activity increased sharply in the Vymara root-zone sample. The blood also broke down much faster there than it did in moss collected outside Vymara’s immediate root zone. The plant-tissue treatment produced a much weaker response. Water, saline and glucose produced almost none.

I repeated the blood treatment using sterilized substrate. This time, there was very little enzymatic activity. When I restored the microbial community isolated from the original root-zone sample, the response returned. To track where the nutrients went, I added a stable-isotope-labeled blood protein to the next treatment. The labeled nitrogen later appeared in Vymara’s roots and developing tissue. Instead, it appears to maintain a microbial community that breaks animal material down outside the plant. Vymara then absorbs the nutrients released into the surrounding moss and substrate.

Would this qualify as indirect carnivory, or is it better interpreted as unusually efficient rhizosphere mineralization?