Teaming with Microbes by Wayne Lewis & Wayne Lewis

Author:Wayne Lewis & Wayne Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2010-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Number of visible organisms in a square foot of various soils. Courtesy Tom Hoffman Graphic Design.

A simple trap will allow you to take a census of the larger animals in your soil. Courtesy Tom Hoffman Graphic Design.

Unsuspecting gastropods and macroarthropods will fall in these simple traps to be counted later. Give traps a visual check every now and then to see what has been captured. If you have kids or pets, skip the antifreeze and use mothballs at your discretion. Both are used to kill entrants to the trap (so they don’t eat each other and mess up the census); they are not attractants, so they are not absolutely necessary. By the end of the week, you should find a few of the larger arthropods such as beetles, millipedes, and centipedes. You might also find some slugs and even a worm or two.

Take inventory of all your traps. Traps empty? This means you need to do a lot of work to restore the soil food webs in your yard. If few of the larger participants in soil food webs are present, some link or links before them on the food chains that make up the web are missing.

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