Effect of Waring Blender Treatment on the Counts of Soil Microorganisms

Dispersion using a Waring blender which, can disintegrate coarse organic substances such as plant debris is considered to be an excellent method for the disintegration of soil aggregates. The advantages of the method which was applied to forest, upland, and paddy soils discussed in this report. The results are summarized as follows: 1) The Waring blender treatment applied for 1–30 min resulted in counts of a far larger number of microorganisms in each of the three types of soils, than in the treatment with a mechanical shaker (10 min). In particular, the number of bacteria in the F-Iayer of the organic horizon of forest soil increased remarkably (8.9 times the values obtained with a mechanical shaker). By the Waring blender treatment, the maximum number of bacteria was obtained after 1–3 min in the forest soils, 2–3 min in the upland soils, and 3–5 min in the paddy soils. On the other hand, the maximum number of fungi was obtained after 2–3 min in the forest soils, 3 min in the upland soils, and 1–2 min in the paddy soils. 2) In all the soils, the Waring blender treatment gave clearly larger B/F (Bacteria/Fungi) ratios than mechanical shaker treatment, as the effect of dispersion of microorganisms by the Waring blender treatment is higher for bacteria than for fungi. These results indicate that the number of bacteria in soil is likely to have been underestimated compared with the number of fungi. 3) The findings obtained here were preliminary studies for the application to paddy fields. The results obtained by the Waring blender method are extremely satisfactory.