Predict no, there are too many factors - and as we can see, stuff happens that can ruin it all, even though everything was pointing towards an excellent ACT in the making
What I can, and do, do is to look at samples under the microscope to check on the kind of
balance we have in there.
At the moment, in my half-amateur state, and while I'm learning to distiguish the critters (and yes, that does take practice and experience!) I am only making sure I have representatives from each set of microbes, and how much diversity there is.
To have a complete soil food web that cycles nutrients sufficiently to attain all those effects of vigorous growth, invisibility to pests, and nutritional quality, we need bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, and microarthropods, followed by earthworms, larger arthropods, and then birds, mammals etc.
View attachment 3947080
The more the merrier, the more diverse, the greater the likelihood we've got all our bases covered. So it's not rocket science
Also, not many specifics are known, because the necessary research seldom gets funded. Which is also why the research we do find more often than not is overspecialized and has some commercial exploitation in mind (fertilizer/pesticide/bioremediation effects), and not really understanding how the whole system works.
But we DO know alot about how a good soil ecosystem should look in general, and we can differentiate the critters by morphology.
Also, we know about facultative microbes, like actinobacteria or lactobacilli, seeing those means the material being sampled could be going both ways, from aerobic to anaerobic (in my case for example, I then see the remnants of testate amoebae too, who usually occur in successionally advanced soils around trees and shrubs), or from anaerobic to aerobic.
And we know anaerobic critters, like the ciliates and larvae. We know that in general, clear fungi with narrow hyphae and without septae (evenly spaced cell divisions in the hyphal strand) are more likely to prefer anaerobic conditions.
And we know that disease causing microbes thrive under anaerobic conditions, so when we start seeing lots fo these guys in our sample, we know bad things are bound to happen.
Not talking about the occasional random specimen here! Because even in an aggregate made by totally squeaky aerobic creatures, the middle can still go anaerobic when it gets big and dense and oxygen can't flow freely. So a ciliate popping up there and cleaning up the mess is actually a good thing, and that's what we have going on in our root systems too: every little corner of the rhizosphere can have different pH's, different inhabitants mining different nutrients on the plant's request.
So if we're trying to make a strong aerobic ACT to boost the aerobic microbial population somewhere, and we see these critters in numbers, we know we're failing. Or if we only see bacteria and a few flagellates, or bacteria and fungi only. Those are usually conditions we're trying to remediate.
And yeah, how the soil ecosystem looks is an expression of the successional stage the soil is at, making that soil good for whatever plants thrive at that stage. For example, as soon as I had gotten my soil aerated (mechanically), thistles stopped growing there - even though there SURELY were gazillions of seeds in the soil.
They just don't sprout anymore.
Here, the most significant indicator is the bacterial to fungal mass ratio, something I haven't ventured into yet, but will be doing shortly. Basically, you count the bacteria in a field of view, and measure the dimensions of fungal strands, to get the masses of each. And depending on that ratio, you can determine what successional stage plant is going to grow well in that.
But there's no fixed scenario, with clear-cut role distribution, that allows us to say, AH! this is clearly eggplant soil!
Variability is too large, with every degree temperature, with every % moisture, different microbes wake up or go to sleep, in different landscapes, climates, even growing the same plants is going to show different specific bacteria/fungi/protozoa/etc etc. So the configuration is always going to be shapeshifty and in constant change.
As I said elsewhere, balance is a verb, and my what a rant this has become, and I don't even know if I answered your question haha
LMAO at your flagellate associations
...because of "flatulence", perhaps?!
They're aerobic protozoans who have these whiplike tentacles they use for locomotion, sensing where the food is, and scooping that food in
They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes!
Here's a very large and distinct one I found in my wormbin (this one even has been identified and named
)
