When a glacier melts, it leaves only intact land in its wake. These craggy, lifeless rocks are beginning to feel the sun and rain for the first time in millennia. Possibly these are some seeds stored in the frozen embrace of the glacier. them. But when the first rains hit its surface, the most that comes out of the ground is poison.
Rocky soils exposed through melting glaciers send acidic water to downstream communities. Over time, plants and soils in a well-developed ecosystem will trap those destructive chemicals like a filter. But this can take decades, as those isolated high-altitude ecosystems advance incredibly slowly. after a glacier retreats.
To enhance this natural protection against climate change, scientists have teamed up with other inhabitants of Peru’s Cordillera Blanca to turn to their famously fluffy agricultural aid: the llama (Llama glama).
After bringing the llamas back to this exposed land for grazing, scientists discovered dramatic innovations in soil quality and ecosystem fitness that recovered in just 3 years. The flames did not fertilize the soil, but they also brought new seeds to the soil. according to a recent article in Scientific Reports.
“I didn’t expect to see significant adjustments in soil composition and vegetation cover in three years. It’s pretty fast,” said Anaïs Zimmer, an environmental scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who led the study. Three of Zimmer’s five colleagues interested in the assignment to live and paint in Peru.
Llamas, descendants of the wild vicuña, are culturally vital in Peru. They provide labor, wool, food, fuel, and fertilizer to the mountain dwellers who have been raising them for 6,000 years. The animals are gentle enough to pack the seeds in the ground without trampling on them. They disperse seeds with their fur and hooves, and even with their droppings, the study team showed.
Innovations in the soil made by the flames are imperative to help save one of the most significant direct effects of glacier retreat: acid rock drainage. Acids, heavy metals and other pollutants that were once trapped under the glacier are being released into the water. bodies, food supplies, and farms. The Uruashraju glacier at the study site lost about part of its duration between 1948 and 1990. All that lost water carried the acid downstream to farms and villages.
To understand how the flames could help this arid post-glacial ecosystem, Zimmer and his team excavated eight plots of land in the glacier’s shadow, about 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) above sea level. In part of those plots, the researchers brought herds of 3 llamas grazed the land for 3 days a month. The other 4 plots were not grazed. The team measured plant variety and their physical condition, as well as soil composition, to perceive how the newly exposed ecosystem has been replaced over time. .
Each time llamas arrived from the plains with more varied vegetation, they brought fertilizers in the form of manure, nitrogen and biological carbon. Once scattered across the arid landscape, the droppings improved soil suitability and helped plants grow faster. The llamas also brought seeds, which dispersed in the llama plots and gave rise to many more plants than in the control plots.
“They took an experimental technique and essentially manipulated sequence number one,” the first steps for organisms to recolonize an arid area, said ecologist Kelsey Reider of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, who was not connected to the study. “I don’t know of any other case where other people have adopted an experimental technique to achieve this. “
Asociación Llama 2000, a Peruvian farmers’ organization founded to repair the cultural practice of llama herding through tourism, has suffered from melting glaciers and the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit the region. The deal worked with Zimmer’s research team to supply the animals. and expertise to bring local herbivores back to those remote landscapes.
“The task is helping us expand our wisdom about preserving plant resources and motivates us to continue learning control techniques” as the climate changes, a mentor from the Llama 2000 Association said in a message to Mongabay.
Zimmer looks back on his team’s ongoing connections with Peruvians (and their fellow animals) who face the effects of melting glaciers on a daily basis. “The studies are very interesting,” he said. It’s very attractive to meet a local needs in collaboration with the local population. “
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Header image: Llamas moving the postglacial landscape at the foot of the Uruashraju Glacier. Photo credit: Anaïs Zimmer.
Sierra Boucher is a graduate student in the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Other Mongabay stories produced by UCSC scholars can be discovered here.
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