Extraordinary Insects by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson

Author:Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

In addition – and this is the really exciting bit – our study showed that the caged logs decomposed more slowly. Quite simply, the cleaning job takes longer when the insects don’t get to help.

A Kindergarten Beneath Your Shoes

I love running, especially on soft forest paths. A half-hour run from my home takes me to a forest reserve strewn with dead trees, like a game of pick-up sticks. I can look around and try to count species, of which there are around 20,000 in Norwegian forests. Of course, not all of them live in ‘my’ forest, but still – how many can I see? I can count several trees, a dozen plants, lichen, fungi, perhaps an elk or a large bird if I move quietly. If it’s summer, the insects will do wonders for my list of species, but even so, I barely spot more than a hundred, even here in the reserve. So where are all the other tens of thousands of species?

An awful lot of the other species are tiny insects and related creatures that live out their lives in hiding. As mentioned, a third of forest species live in and on dead trees. The other important habitat is the soil, because there is no other place where species are packed together so densely. The tiny patch of earth stuck to the sole of my running shoes after a trip to the forest may be home to more bacteria than there are human beings in the US, not to mention thousands of thin fungal threads. Here in the soil, you also find a myriad of important critters and small insects. A whole zoo of little creatures lives down there in the darkness: earthworms and mites, roundworms, pot worms, springtails, and woodlice. All these species – that we don’t give a hoot about on a day-to-day basis – have important jobs in the recycling sector: they chew and dig and air and mix. In the blink of an eye, rubbish has been reconverted into soil, ready to sprout new life. It’s pretty miraculous, really.

Soil is important, but masses of it vanishes every year. Not because runners dash off with chunks of it stuck to their trainers but because of erosion: erosion by wind and water. Some of this is natural but in many places the soil loss is high because we humans have removed natural vegetation. Consequently, there’s nothing left to retain the soil, which is blown away or runs off into the sea, and elsewhere. This is losing us billions of tonnes of topsoil every year – and along with the soil, we are losing crucial diversity of decomposers, which are our guarantee that the recycling of nutrients will continue.

The thin layer of earth is the planet’s skin: a thin, living layer over the magma (the layer of molten or semi-molten rock) and the rocky crust. Perhaps we ought to pay a little more attention to the Earth’s skincare? Like a teenager anxiously checking his or her complexion

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