167,000 Kinds of Microbes Live in NYC's Central Park

When you think of a place teeming with life forms, you usually think of the Amazon rainforest or some other wilderness. But Manhattan’s Central Park, located in the midst of the nation’s most densely populated city with 27,000 people per square mile, turns out to be a pretty amazing hotspot for biodiversity as well, on a microscopic level.

The 843-acre park’s soil is home to 167,000 different microbial life forms, according to a study just published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society.

“Central Park soils harbored nearly as many distinct soil microbial phylotypes and types of soil communities as we found in biomes across the globe — including arctic, tropical and desert soils,” wrote the researchers. “This integrated cross-domain investigation highlights that the amount and patterning of novel and uncharacterized diversity at a single urban location matches that observed across natural ecosystems spanning multiple biomes and continents.”

“There are all these organisms and we don’t know what they’re doing, we don’t have names for them or anything like that,” Noah Fierer, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado who is one of the paper’s authors, told the New York Times.

According to Scientific American, the researchers looked at 596 different soil samples from the park, and compared the microbes from them to 52 other soil samples taken from all over the planet. Amazingly, they found microorganisms that also exist in a wide variety of other environments, ranging from tropical rainforests and prairies to deserts. The only area that didn’t have any microbes in common with Central Park, oddly, was Antarctica.

From Discovery News