:strip_icc()/i.s3.glbimg.com/v1/AUTH_e536e40f1baf4c1a8bf1ed12d20577fd/internal_photos/bs/2024/y/l/BUpJEWRW26OLjRnnJ7Fg/pexels-asphotograpy-1002703.jpg "Study shows music can help restore degraded ecosystems | Science and health")
Music is an essential part of human culture, with its ability to stimulate emotions, relax and enhance communication between different people. But now, scientists from Flinders University in Australia have discovered that musical sounds can also be beneficial to nature, helping to restore ecosystems.
In this new work, the team demonstrated the benefits of acoustic stimulation on the growth and reproduction rate of Trichoderma harzianum bacteria. This mushroom was selected for its role in disease protection, plant growth, and better utilization of nutrients. In agriculture, it has been shown to paralyze other fungi that are often plant pathogens.
The sound chosen to play the microorganisms in the Petri dishes was a white noise track called Tinnitus Flosser Masker at 8 kHz. According to a report by Newsweek magazineIt was played for half an hour every day at 80 dB.
“In our experiments, we showed that acoustic stimulation resulted in increased fungal biomass and increased spore activity compared to controls,” said the lead author of the work, microbial ecologist Dr. Jake Robinson, in an article published in the journal Biology Letters.
“We are striving to find new ways to accelerate and improve levels of beneficial fungi and other microbes in degraded soils. This could have far-reaching benefits for restoring degraded landscapes and farmland to feed the world.”
The researchers said the effects observed after playing the tone could be due to the so-called piezoelectric effect, where sound waves are converted into an electrical charge that stimulates the fungi.
“The mechanism responsible for this phenomenon may be stimulation of the innate mechanoreceptor and/or possible piezoelectric effect; however, more research is needed to confirm this hypothesis.
Robinson said one of the next steps will be to study the benefits of microbial growth on plant health and then try to expand the experiment outside the laboratory. “We also need to understand whether this approach could have any cascading or unintended consequences,” he added.
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