COMMUNITIES of bacteria living in the oil sumps of machinery follow the same ecological 鈥渓aw鈥� that governs the diversity of animals on islands. It had been thought that microbial colonies did not follow such patterns.
In a group of islands of differing sizes, the bigger the island the more animal species will live there. Now researchers have found that this theory, called island biogeography, also holds for bacteria living in oil in the tanks of lathes and milling machines.
Christopher van der Gast and colleagues at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxford, UK, studied an 鈥渁rchipelago鈥� of 15 machines with sumps ranging in size from 9 to 180 litres. They found that the abundance and genetic diversity of the bacteria living in them followed the same pattern as for plants and animals on real islands, with smaller sumps exhibiting lower diversity (Environmental Microbiology, vol 7, p 1220).
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This will be news to many ecologists. 鈥淭he new work provides evidence that micro-organisms do show biogeographic patterns, including species-area relationships,鈥� says Matt Spencer, an ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.
Van der Gast鈥檚 team measured diversity using characteristic gene sequences rather than the traditional technique of isolating the bacteria and growing them.
