NEW SCIENTIST: Raindrops make soil bacteria take off and fly through air

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In the experiment, these aerosols only travelled small distances, in the order of centimetres. “While dispersal of bacteria on this scale would be important for dispersal and connectivity of metapopulations in soil, I doubt it would have important implications for microbial community assembly and dispersal on large scales,” says Franciska de Vries, an ecologist at the University of Manchester, UK.