A team of Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has found that grazing by livestock leads to lower carbon storage in soil compared to grazing by wild herbivores.
Livestock is the most abundant large mammal on earth. If the carbon stored in soil under livestock can be increased by even a small amount, then it can have a big impact on climate mitigation.
About Antibiotics
- Antibiotics are remarkable drugs capable of killing biological organisms in one’s body without harming the body.
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- India is the world’s largest consumer of antibiotics. India’s excessive antibiotic usage is leading to a power never before seen mutation within bacteria.
Highlights
- It was observed that herbivores play a key role in stabilizing the pool of soil carbon and the recent study showcases the difference as to how they affect the soil carbon stocks between livestock such as sheep and cattle compared to their wild herbivores such as the yak and ibex.
- Impact of Antibiotics: The use of veterinary antibiotics such as tetracycline on livestock is making carbon storage lower in the soil as compared to other grazing herbivores.
- These antibiotics, when released into the soil through dung and urine, alter the microbial communities in the soil in ways that are detrimental to sequestering carbon.
- Antibiotics such as tetracycline are long-lived and can linger in the soil for decades resulting in ecological imbalance.
- The difference in CUE: Although soils from the wild and livestock areas had many similarities, they differed in one key parameter called carbon use efficiency (CUE), which determines the ability of microbes to store carbon in the soil.
- CUE is defined as the ratio of net carbon gain to gross carbon assimilation during a period.
- The soil in the livestock areas had 19% lower CUE.