The State Bacterium Why not? New Hampshire has a state bird, flower, tree, mineral, gem, even an insect. Why not a bacterium?

All that's needed is a proposal to the legislature, a committee to select the potential candidates, the selection, and a photo contest. The ultimate recognition might come with all the votes cast and a species chosen, published and posted on the state Web site: a U.S Postal Service stamp bearing an image of the New Hampshire state bacterium.

Bacteria live in every environment on earth and possibly other worlds as well. Between 100 million to one billion of these "animalcules" inhabit each teaspoon of the garden soil you moved while planting your new perennials.

And that nice, fresh scent of warm spring soil we all associate as clean and natural? Thank those one-celled actinomycetes, bacteria that sleep through the winter only to awaken to the increase in the sun's energy that brings us spring.

Their relatives, archeabacteria, were there at the beginning of life on the earth, 3.5 billion years ago, capturing the sun's energy and opening the door for the incredible variety of life on our earth.

Although news stories generally feature harmful bacteria such as Salmonella saintpaul that's been sickening people across the nation, or E. coli O157:H7, responsible for so many ground-meat recalls, the bad guys are a tiny fraction of a huge world of bacteria, a life-world so important that taxonomists classify bacteria as a separate kingdom.

Consider a road kill at the side of the road. Watch over time as the carcass begins its ancient reversal back into the soil. Before the maggots began devouring it, bacteria worked inside the body from the moment of its passing, breaking down and recycling its carbon-based molecules.

Bacteria help decompose the remains of everything: insects, flowers, leaves, trees-even other bacteria-recycling the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen through their bodies to be used by your grass, your tomatoes, and eventually by you.

But which one of our little creatures in the environment works enough magic in our state to be worthy of recognition as the official state bacterium? One of the species that work so tirelessly to decompose all the materials you placed in your compost pile would find its way to the top of anyone's list. Or perhaps one of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria, working with peas, beans and other legumes to add nitrogen to the soil.

My vote though, goes for Aquaspirillium magnetotacticum, a dumpy, rod-shaped, bacterium, with one whip-like flagellum at each end, found in the oxygen-poor muds of our coastal environments and freshwater lakes.

As its name implies, A. magnetotacticum has magnetic properties resulting from small (especially small in bacteria) pieces of lodestone (Fe3O4) in its little tiny body allowing it to serve as a biological compass. The addition of lodestone in this bacterium's body gives it the ability in the Northern Hemisphere to swim up and down relative to the earth's magnetic field to the low-oxygen environment they favor. The advantage for this organism is, in a magnetic field like the Earth's, A .mag, it can sense oxygen's presence and then move away to a friendly environment.

Like many bacteria, it prefers to decompose organic material found in low oxygen levels of our salt marshes and in the soft mud of our New Hampshire lakes. Once these muds are disturbed by kids swimming, dogs frolicking, and lake shore life in general, these bacteria use the downward trend of the Earth's magnetic field to find their way back to a low-oxygen environment.

If A. magnetotactium is found everywhere, what’s the value to New Hampshire? It turns out that A. mag. was first identified in the 1970s by Richard Blakemore, PhD, of our own University of New Hampshire.

As a graduate student in Georgia, I remember a page in my bacterial physiology textbook describing A.mag. and there, underneath the photo I found this caption: A magnetotactic bacterium found in a freshwater pond in New Hampshire. (Courtesy of R. and N. Blakemore of the University of New Hampshire.)

What serendipity! Here studying late at night in a cold, steel, laboratory, as far away from a freshwater pond in New Hampshire as I could be, a picture of a little bacterium was taking me to a remote corner of my brain, stimulating those storage neurons to release the sounds of loons, the smell of white pine, and images of bunchberry on the forest floor. A. mag was pointing the way home.

By Suzy Martin, Master Gardener
UNH Cooperative Extension

Posted July 23, 2008