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| 1. 3D Global Plate tectonic movement with caves showing up as they were formed include areas with sampled bacteria and their associated papers |
| 2. Determine the depths at which previous bacterial diversity studies (can be specific to make project less huge) |
| 3. Why aren't caves included in Any cave LTER sites? We need bigger and more lengthy analyses to answer more broad and large scale ecological questions |
| 4. How much does a bacterial cell weigh?What is the range in cell size in cave bacterial species? Does size change when in nature vs lab? Body mass is likely the most telling physical character of an organism |
| 5. Is there an optimal size for a cave bacterium? What is it? Ex: mammals on islands When big they get dwarfed and when small they get huge |
| 6. How does distribution of species vary as a function of cell density? Species density? |
| 7. How variable is the average abundance? What causes the variability? |
| 8. How does metabolic rate scale with mass among cave bacteria? Bacteria have a slope of 1.96 and the metabolic rate falls between 10-15 and 10-5 (Delong et al 2010) |
| 9. Are cave and surface bacteria equally metabolically efficient? In the energy it take to produce 1 unit biomass as a unit of mass 10-3 to 10-2 |
| 10. Does genome size change from surface to the subsurface in bacterial organisms? |
| 11. Are bacterial species able to persist as far into the earth as they are into the air? |
| 12. Where and in what ways do bacterial organisms in cave express fractality? Does the size (width/ length) or number of bacterial appendages (pili/fimbrae) scale with anything? like nutrient uptake, cell size, species (taxanomic level) Does the sex pilus scale with anything? Number of genes exchanged? Frequency? |
| 13. Are fimbrae or pili used for nutrient uptake? If they are what is the rate of uptake and does this scale with its size? |
| 14. Is bacterial diversity in caves K over T? |
| 15. Do we have energy diagrams for caves? |
| 16. what's going on at the cellular level in my antibiotic agar diffusion tests? Where are the cells? What life phase are they in? |