Stories

Springtails - worldwide jumpers

Springtails are tiny six-legged animals that you meet every day, but hardly notice. They can survive in big cities, on ice in Antarctica, in deepest caves, and in rainforest canopies. Some scientists call them the earliest known and the most numerous “insects” on Earth. Springtails are famous jumpers – if they were as large as humans, they would easily be jumping over 10-storey buildings. This ability allows them to escape from danger. Every day springtails are very busy, improving soil health and supporting numerous species of spiders, beetles, ants and other small predators on our planet. They are a key part of soil biodiversity, but we still need to learn a lot about them and many of these beautiful creatures are yet to be discovered.

Original text is under revision in the Frontiers in Young Minds, special issue "Soil biodiversity". Stay tuned, it is coming out soon!

https://kids.frontiersin.org/collection/11796/soil-biodiversity

How big "superpredators" can be?

Thinking about a “superpredator” we would imagine a white shark, or a tiger. As humans, we intuitively expect large predators to occupy top trophic position in food web. This is true for marine food webs, that have been long recognized as size-structured – they are based on unicellular phytoplankton, that is being eaten by zooplankton, which is further being eaten by fish and mammals. Thus, organic matter is transferred all the way from unicellular producers to large predators, such as white sharks. On the other hand, terrestrial ecosystems are dominated by multicellular vascular plants, which can be eaten by both small animals, such as leafhoppers, and large animals, such as megaherbivores. In this case, organic matter is unlikely to be transferred from small herbivores to large predators; in other words, tigers do not hunt leafhoppers, or animals that feed on leafhoppers. This straightforward idea appears from theory, but has never been tested empirically across invertebrate and vertebrate consumers and across ecosystems.

To find out our study on this topic – check out the publication in the American Naturalist

https://www.amnat.org/an/newpapers/Dec-Potapov.html

Bath in the middle of a desert

Travelling to Chile in the end of July is cooling you down, as it is winter time in the Southern hemisphere. With a colleague of mine, we were visiting greatly organised "IsoEcol" conference and then spent two days in Atacama, which was a remarkable experience. Atacama desert is one of the driest places on Earth, located 2000-3000 km above the sea level. It resembles a landscape on Mars, which you can bike or drive through. It is very dry, but not hot – in the night it can go below zero. Nevertheless, we managed to take a bath there. The salt lake on the picture located right in the middle of the desert and it is so salty that you are laying on it like on a sofa. Interestingly, it is also inhabited – it was full with small crustaceans! Sadly, however, no Collembola were detected around.