How many microbes
Apart from the obvious statement of "enough to be going on with"
I did a back of envelope job for soil and came up with somewhere near
the same as the marine count i.e. 1 to 10exp29
This is not so surprising as there is something like a million times
more volume of water than soil on the planet and this will compensate
for the lowish cell concentration of the seawater.
What struck me whilst doing this was the difficulty of calculating the
total intestinal flora of the planet. Globally that is a REALLY big heap
of **** !
Peter Harris,
Department of Soil Science,
The University of Reading,
U.K.
AKA P.J.Harris at reading.ac.uk
