I know there are special bacterias or viruses that exist to feed on certain things, or give diseases to certain plants or animals. If I leave a banana in a room, how does the “banana” specialist bacteria end up finding it? Where was it before?
In: Biology
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Firstly, Bananas go brown because of chemical reactions not bacteria. Read more here
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-bananas-turn-brown
Bacteria is not finding a target. Something/Someone should introduce it to the target. For instance we make curd where I come from and to do that we have to add a few drops of lactobacillus(either old curd drop or red chilly with stem intact) to the warm milk to create Curd.
Bacteria does not “find” a target. Instead, you have so much bacteria just going everywhere that some inevitably finds some food it can live on. The bacteria that does not find food reproduces and makes more bacteria which goes out hoping to land on even more food.
Since you brought up bananas, let use that as an example. At one time, there was a different type of banana that everyone ate, but it was wiped out by a disease that loves eating bananas. I believe it was fungal rather than bacteria, but the same principles apply as far as spreading goes. The disease wiped out nearly all bananas of that type and has made it impossible to mass produce them any more. So how did it spread to just that type of banana?
It didn’t. It spread everywhere, but couldn’t grow anywhere else, so the spores or whatever just never turned into more fungus. When it spread to other bananas, though, since it has a really easy time of eating that banana, it spread like crazy. Since banana plants tend to grow near other banana plants, the spore and growth could easily find other banans to go to and nearly the entire variety was wiped out.
Even now, dormant spores of the disease are still lurking. Any attempt to try to mass produce that variety again will just cause those spores to land on a banana plant and grow again.
Same thing with specialized bacteria. They don’t “find” whatever it is they are really good at eating, they just spread everywhere until they happen to land on it, and they can survive quite some time just floating around, waiting for something to infect. They do not need to find anything very often to survive.
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