🍄 Biocontrol Agents and Entomopathogenic Fungi

Monitoring microbial diversity and the fungal-to-bacterial ratio is important for ecosystem resilience

This is like biocontrol agents. You could consider this kind of a biocontrol agent, but you can also consider certain fungi. Or we mentioned BT, bacillus thuringiensis. That's a biocontrol agent. We talked about how that can kill caterpillars or other pest insects. And it's a bacteria, so it's not a toxic chemical, right?

Then you've got, this one's really cool, entomopathogenic fungi. It's a big mouthful, but basically, if you see those grasshoppers on the right, on the side of the screen there, those grasshoppers, they're zombie. This is the zombie fungus. Yeah, if there were zombies, a zombie apocalypse, it would be because of a fungus jumping to humans.

These fungi attack, they infect animal organisms like grasshoppers or other insects, and they literally kill them. But for a brief moment, they'll control the behavior and they'll cause, one time I was hiking in the woods and on a mountain top and I saw all these flies and they were all like, they were like creating these white.

Beards it was like a beard hanging from a tree and like what is that? I mean now I realize it was a Entomopathogenic fungus that had attacked the flies and it took over their brain and caused them to fly and Find each other and form a big old mess Hang in there like an icicle crazy, but it does that because it's it hacks the nervous system of the animal and then makes it behave in a way that's going to spread the spores.

Yep, yep, pretty cool stuff. So microbial diversity is key to ecosystem resilience. There is no silver bullet. That's why I don't really have to know exactly what all is in this compost. It just works because it's so complex. But again, back to pathogens, they are part of it and they are not disease causing when you have complexity.