Living Smoke
Texas high school student Sara Mims looked through her microscope at particles she had trapped from the air. She was trying to capture dust and fungal spores from a Saharan wind event across the globe. What she saw changed the trajectory of her high school science project. “I didn’t know what I was looking at. I was a high school student, not a microbiologist,” says Mims.
It was only after checking satellite images and seeing large smoke plumes arriving from fires across the Gulf of Mexico that she realized she was seeing charred material along with fungal spores. She found that she could trap and culture more fungal spores in smoky rather than clear air. This and other clever experiments led Mims and her research assistant — her dad — to propose that fire-generated air currents carry living microbes.
Surprisingly, Mims’s findings lay dormant for over a decade after she published them back in 2004. Nevertheless, her experiments are the first example of a growing field of research called pyroaerobiology, which lies at the intersection of fire ecology, atmospheric science, and microbiology. It’s the study of smoke-borne bacteria, fungi, and other microbes: who they are, where they go, and what they do when they get there. Pyroaerobiology stems from the observation that wildfire smoke is — in a sense — alive, which has implications for human health and the environment. And it’s growing even more critical with the increasing frequency, size, and intensity of wildfires.
Journalist and microbiologist Anna Marija Helt writes about the ecological footprint of wildfire smoke in this online exclusive.
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