December 2005

December 14, 2005

Under a layer of protective leaves, sheltered from the biting wind, thousands of miniature life forms thrive. Springtails and spiders, moths and millipedes, dipterans and dermapterans. Much smaller than the debris that shelters them, they live quiet lives of desperation—avoiding the jaws of predators who are giants by comparison, but themselves are tiny to human observers.

And smaller still, life thrives. Lost to our sight completely is a world revealed only with the aid of magnifying glass. Roundworms--known to graduates of Bio 213 as nematodes--exist in near anonymity. In soil and leaves, fruit and muscle, their numbers are unbelievable and astronomical…6,000 per milliliter, 90,000 per rotten apple, 9 billion per acre. They are, perhaps, the most abundant of multi-celled animals on earth.

Simple, yet elegant, these threadlike animals exist unseen and unknown to the billions of back-boned beings that tower above them. Into our awareness they come only when they infest, infect or kill, yet most are benign. To observers willing to dirty their fingers and remove the barrier between them and us, these creatures await our discovery and our wonder on a cold December day.

with an eye on nature,

Wally