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The water lilies covering this stretch of the Mekong may be doing more than floating.
Water lily leaves host distinct communities of bacteria on their surfaces—and the plants themselves can alter the chemistry and microbiology of the water around them. Lakes and waterways with significant water lily coverage show measurably different microbial compositions than those without, including lower levels of cyanobacteria, whose blooms can choke aquatic ecosystems. The plants may help suppress them.¹

📸: @phucle1204

Every horse in this herd runs on bacteria.¹

A horse's gut is home to billions of bacteria that help convert grass into usable energy.²
Gut microbiome composition is strongly associated with cardiovascular fitness. More functionally diverse gut communities have been associated with better energy metabolism, lower fatigue markers in the blood, and higher aerobic capacity. What lives in a horse's gut may help shape what the horse is capable of.

📸: @alan_alberdiev

Those sticky droplets aren’t just a trap.
They’re a digestive system built with microbial help.¹

The mucilage coating every tendril of this Cape Sundew (Drosera capensis) hosts its own microbial community. The dominant species is an acid-loving fungus, Acrodontium crateriforme, found living in sundew mucilage across multiple species throughout the plant’s global range. When prey is caught, the fungus enhances digestion—secreting enzymes that break down the insect alongside the plant’s own. The sundew and the fungus activate different genes during the process, working in concert.

📸: @terrariums.yt

Tropical rainforest soil holds one of the most complex microbial communities on Earth—and the trees above it depend on it.¹
Dense with bacteria and fungi responsible for cycling carbon and nitrogen back into the trees above, this microbial community helps sustain the ecosystem. When that forest is cleared, those microbial communities and their functional genes are significantly altered or lost. Even after decades of regrowth, the soil microbiome may not fully recover. The trees can come back, but the microbiome underneath them may not.

📸: @florisgone

Bacteria may be slowly dissolving El Capitan.¹

Rock-weathering bacteria colonize exposed stone, adhering directly to mineral surfaces and secreting compounds that help dissolve elements like iron, aluminum, and silicon from the rock. Over time, this process contributes to the breakdown ofsolid granite into the minerals and nutrients that become soil. The forest lining the Merced River below—the pines, the undergrowth, the valley floor—is sustained in part by long-term geological and biological processes, including the gradual work of microbes on the rock above it.

📸: @just_passinthrough

This bumblebee covered in pollen relies in part on the bacteria residing in its gut.¹

Floral pollen and nectar can naturally contain hydrogen peroxide, heavy metals, and pesticides — meaning every foraging trip may involve chemical exposure. Bumblebees carry a small, consistent community of gut bacteria that can influence how they respond to these stressors. When exposures are high, the gut microbiome can be disrupted, which is associated with declines in bee health.
The bacteria ( or these microbial partners) may help the bee tolerate the challenges of foraging.

📸: @quiet.macro

This bumblebee covered in pollen relies in part on the bacteria residing in its gut.¹

Floral pollen and nectar can naturally contain hydrogen peroxide, heavy metals, and pesticides — meaning every foraging trip may involve chemical exposure. Bumblebees carry a small, consistent community of gut bacteria that can influence how they respond to these stressors. When exposures are high, the gut microbiome can be disrupted, which is associated with declines in bee health.
The bacteria ( or these microbial partners) may help the bee tolerate the challenges of foraging.

📸: @quiet.macro

This bumblebee covered in pollen relies in part on the bacteria residing in its gut.¹

Floral pollen and nectar can naturally contain hydrogen peroxide, heavy metals, and pesticides — meaning every foraging trip may involve chemical exposure. Bumblebees carry a small, consistent community of gut bacteria that can influence how they respond to these stressors. When exposures are high, the gut microbiome can be disrupted, which is associated with declines in bee health.
The bacteria ( or these microbial partners) may help the bee tolerate the challenges of foraging.

📸: @quiet.macro

Beneath the purple lupine blooms in this meadow, bacteria are turning nitrogen gas into plant food.¹

Inside tiny nodules on lupine roots, bacteria do something no plant can do alone—pull nitrogen from the air and convert it into a usable nutrient. They go further still, helping plants access phosphorus that would otherwise remain trapped and inaccessible in the soil. Nitrogen and phosphorus are the two nutrients most likely to limit plant growth and together, these microbial partnerships help supply both.
The wildflowers surrounding the lupine may be growing in soil the lupine's microbes helped shape.

📸: @melisssabaliton

Monarch butterflies go into metamorphosis as one creature and emerge with a dramatically different microbiome.¹

As monarch caterpillars eat their way through milkweed, their gut bacteria shift during larval development. Then, inside the chrysalis, the microbial community is reshaped. The adult butterfly that emerges carries a gut community markedly different from their caterpillar stage.
Every butterfly in this tree crossed 3,000 miles to a mountain in Michoacán, Mexico it had never seen—each one carrying a newly shaped microbiome for the journey.

📸: @hobopeeba

Lava leaves the ground at over 2,000°F—and bacteria are on it within hours of it cooling.¹
Carried by wind and deposited from the atmosphere, the first microbes land on rock that has never hosted life. With almost no organic matter and little water, they build from minimal resources—using carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere, slowly making the rock habitable for everything that comes after. When winter arrives, the microbial community shifts dramatically, then stabilizes into a pattern so consistent it repeats across three separate eruptions at the same Icelandic volcano.
This is how ecosystems begin—from microbes shaping what comes next.

📸: @kevinpages_

The red rock of Kazakhstan's Mangystau desert gets its color from iron oxides that coat the sand grains. The pale streaks running through it reflect bacterial activity that has altered the rock.¹
Deep within the rock, iron-reducing bacteria can dissolve those coatings away, leaving bleached halos in otherwise rust-red rock. The contrast is a byproduct of microbial metabolism. These microbial signatures are now studied as clues for signs of e life on Mars, where rovers have photographed strikingly similar iron-rich formations.

📸: @nick_mge

Microbes predate plants by roughly 1-2 billion years and animals by 3 billion.¹,²

If their existence spanned a full day, humans would arrive only in the final seconds.³

They are the earliest photosynthesizers, the ancestors of mitochondria, and fundamental to life on Earth.⁴,⁵,⁶

Their lineage has endured glacial periods, asteroid impacts, and massive volcanic eruptions—evolving, adapting, and persisting through it all.

Today, like every day, we sit in gratitude for these wise elders. And we look to them for solutions to the challenges of this moment, and the ones still to come.

Happy Earth Day 🌎

This brown bear cub in coastal Alaska is inheriting a rich and dynamicmicrobial landscape.¹

Gut bacteria in brown bears here can be as varied as the landscape itself—salmon, sedge, berries, clams are each associated with different microbes, and different functional capabilities in the bear’s gut. The more varied the diet, the more diverse the microbiome, helping the gut adapt to whatever the land offers next.
This cub is just starting to eat solid food. Every new bite exposes it to new microbes.

📸: @brookelittlebear