Microbial Roles in Caves

Book excerpt: Caves are dark, underground hollow spaces with relatively constant temperature, high humidity, and limited nutrients. Many caves are associated with karst topography, which is formed by the dissolution of soluble bedrock, such as limestone, dolomite and gypsum, in areas where groundwaters are undersaturated with respect to the minerals in the host rock. Karst landforms spread widely, accounting for approximately 20% of the earth’s dry ice-free surface (Ford and Williams, 2007). As a typical feature of subsurface landscape, karst caves develop globally, with over 50,000 distributed in the United States (Barton and Jurado, 2007). China also has a large contiguous karst terrain, and the Yunnan–Guizhou plateau in the southwest developed most karst caves, among which the longest cave exceeds 138 km (Zhang and Zhu, 2012). Many caves are relatively shallow and form near the water table in karst terranes, although some caves develop by deep-seated hypogenic process at substantial depths and by process other than dissolution such as lava flows. Caves are oligotrophic ecosystems with less than 2 mg of total organic carbon per liter, yet host flourishing microbial groups (Figure 1A), with an average number of 106 microbial cells per gram of cave rock (Barton and Jurado, 2007). The study revealed a high diversity within Bacteria domain and Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria were abundant in oligotrophic cave samples of air, rock, sediment and water. Chloroflexi, Planctomycetes, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, Acidobacteria, Nitrospirae, Gemmatimonadetes, and Verrucomicrobia also accounted for large proportions of the total microbial community in caves (Wu et al., 2015; Zhu et al., 2019). In some organic cave samples such as biofilms in sulfur cave, bat guanos, spiders’ webs and earthworm castings, Mycobacterium was prevalently detected (Modra et al., 2017; Sarbu et al., 2018; Hubelova et al., 2021; Pavlik et al., 2021). Over 500 genera of fungi, such as Penicillium, Aspergillus and Mortierella have been reported in caves (Vanderwolf et al., 2013), and new fungal species were identified from cave air, rock, sediment and water samples (Zhang et al., 2017, 2021). These microbial communities contain novel diversity, and promote important biogeochemical processes. With no sunlight, microorganisms in cave environment cannot perform photosynthesis, and are intensively involved in the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and metals such as Fe and Mn to offset the lack of exogenous nutrients and energy.