invertophiles

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Bdellidae: Snout mites are abundant in many habitats and are diverse, but relatively poorly known. They hunt on surfaces for small invertebrate prey which they suck dry with their distinctive snout. Here’s four from the Dandenong Ranges National Park, on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia: three of these images are of mites that were living on the under-surface of leaves, and the other - a different species - on the surface of a moist, rotten log.

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Did you know insects love yellow?

Many insects REALLY are attracted to things that are yellow. On a row of roses in my mother’s garden most flies were sitting on yellow roses: the pink, red and white roses had hardly any. Ten minutes of taking pictures on a cool rainy afternoon yielded this group of 6 really quite different flies, belonging to 4-6 different fly families.

One of the great things about insects - and other terrestrial invertebrates - is that you barely need to step outside to begin to find tonnes of interesting things!

Just need to look closely...

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What comes around, goes to ground...

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Pseudoscorpions...like scorpions, only not!

When you discover pseudoscorpions I expect you to be charmed; if not, then I surely won’t forgive you.

Pseudoscorpions, as their name suggests, are very distantly related to scorpions - at least they are in the same class (Arachnida), along with spiders, harvestmen, mites and a few other slightly unusual odds and ends. In contrast to scorpions they obviously lack a tail and sting and are quite tiny, mostly millimetres long and cryptic (you need to be looking closely).

Here in Australia (where these pictures were all taken) there are around 150 described species in about 21 different families. Experts estimate there might be 700 species, meaning most remain undescribed. They are commonly found in leaf litter or under bark, but can also be found in ants nests and caves.

Remarkably, these creatures have been around since the middle Devonian (380 million years ago) and are considered one of the first organisms to leave the oceans for dry land.

Good on ya pseudoscorpions!

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Trombidiformes are fine ‘plush toy’ mites. Free living as adults and parasites in earlier stages. Actually, even more complex than this.

Dandendong Ranges, Victoria, Australia

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Possibly the World’s Most Common Predation Event...

Bdellid mites (Bdellidae) possibly have the best family name ever: how many other things can you think of that start with BD?

Bdellid mites are abundant in the environment all over the place and their prey, especially springtails (Collembola), are amongst the most numerous animals on the planet. So, it seems logical that bdellids preying on springtails would be billions of time more common than predation events you might be more familiar with: like a tiger catching a deer. It’s just that, at a millimetre long, mites and their behaviours are  just not quite so obvious.

Like so Many of the Little Things.

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Death is Life, for Sundews.

Species of the genus Drosera are commonly known as sundews. They are widespread, with species found on most continents (mainly in the southern hemisphere), and diverse, with several hundred described species. Sundews are carnivorous plants that use sticky-tipped glandular hairs to capture animals, mainly insects. The plant releases enzymes that contribute to the decay of prey, releasing nutrients, some of which are absorbed by the plant.

Here in Australia we are lucky, with Drosera common in many moister habitats and diverse, and around half of the world’s species present. These images come from suburban Melbourne; from a little nature reserve (Blackburn Lake) surrounded by houses, which still supports several species of sundew in abundance.

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Charisma and the Rest...

Almost all animal photos you see on tumblr, the bright, the beautiful, the bodacious, constitute a minor part of biodiversity. When you think of mammals you probably think of elephants or tigers, rather than shrews or rats. Think of insects and it’s more likely butterflies or jewel beetles, than parasitic wasps or fleas. I bet you’re much more likely to reblog something spectacular than something that’s really interesting, but brown.

So here’s some brown things and I dare you...

These are all pselaphine beetles. That means they belong to the subfamily Pselaphinae. Once upon a time pselaphines were pselaphids, in a family of their own: Pselaphidae. Confused? The molecular revolution has allowed us to better understand the relationships of all organisms and this group is just one. Now they belong to the mega-diverse beetle family Staphylinidae, commonly known as rove beetles.

Pselaphines are extremely abundant and like tigers, predators, but less than a couple of millimetres long, and mainly in leaf litter. Here in Australia, where there are an estimated 1500 species in this group, you can find more than 20 species and 100s of individuals in a couple of square metres of wet forest floor litter. It will be likely that of these 20 species <5 have been named - the other 15 are yet to be formally described. So charisma has an impact on what we know about biodiversity and on biologists themselves. Many more work on birds than beetles. Many more on butterflies than pselaphines. I’m a little backwards because it’s ‘the rest’ I find really interesting and I’ll leave the charismatic to the masses.

Good to stand out from the crowd, I reckon.

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You like to climb trees?

Some of the best things about photographing terrestrial invertebrates are:

1. there are so many of them (individuals and species),

2. they do a multitude of things, and

3. you can sit in 1 place for hours and find 100s of species.

This little springtail (Collembola) was climbing about on a fungus (a Calocera species) growing on a rotten log. I only noticed it because I was trying to photograph a fungivorous beetle that had attracted my attention (in the first image the beetle is the blurry blob in the foreground). The springtail is not a species I’ve photographed before but perhaps that’s because of its diminutive size with a body length of <1 mm. To the naked eye is essentially looks like a little black blob.

I’m not sure what species (or even genus) it is, although I’d guess Sminthurinus but could be completely wrong (likely!). That’s the other side of the terrestrial invertebrate coin; there is so much diversity that it’s impossible to know all the major groups well. That’s why I specialise on beetles but that doesn’t mean I can’t be distracted by springtails climbing fungal ‘trees’.

Just so Many Little Things!

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Forest fungi iPhone photography. A smart phone camera, with its tiny camera and ability to get close to the ground is great for interesting fungi shots. You certainly don't need fancy and expensive equipment to get outside and document the natural world. Why don't you try it?

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One Individual, Four Perspectives...

This is four pictures of the same spider on a single leaf of Olearia agrophylla, an Australian wet forest tree species with leaves that are glossy-green above and furry and white below. She ran around and around, over and under the leaf as I took the pictures and thoughtfully posed every now and then. She is, I think, a little flower/crab spider (Thomisidae) with spiny anterior legs for hunting and clasping prey. These and related little spiders (a few mm across) can be common on plants where they sit and patiently wait for a feed, perhaps a small fly or another tasty arthropod.

Sweet little thing isn’t she?

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Red Velvet Cupcakes. Or. Red Velvet Mites. You Choose...

Mites are among the oldest and most numerous organisms on the planet. They are diverse in form (30,000+ described species) and phylogeny (350 families) and extraordinarily abundant in a wide range of habitats, including your head. A couple of hectares or a few acres and you have the planets human population in mites. The group shown here are among the few that you might actually notice, unless you are an acarologist or obsessed with the little things. Pretty obvious why they are called red velvet mites, I reckon.

Sweet little things aren’t they? Just like cupcakes.

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So much diversity, so little time...

This is a new genus of Pseudachorutinae springtail (a subfamily of Collembola) known from several sites in southeastern Australia. It’s quite large for a springtail at about 3-4 mm long yet, like so many springtail species and genera, remains undescribed because it belongs to one of the (supposedly) less charismatic groups of organisms. For me, this little beast is oozing and dripping charisma. Just look at the little Dumbo-the-elephant-like face!

Once you discover invertebrate diversity it’s hard to go back to the vertocentric side!

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Nature’s Harvest(men)...

These are harvestmen, distant spider relatives and truly primitive arachnids.They belong to the order Opiliones and are found across most of the planet, absent like many terrestrial invertebrates from Antarctica. They can be distinguished from spiders because, instead of a spidery 2-segmented body arrangement (cephalothorax+abdomen), they have a fused body that doesn’t obviously consist of two segments. It might also be evident from the images here that they don’t have 8 eyes like many (but not all) spiders, but rather two.

The species shown here were all found on a single afternoon at Lake Mountain in the highlands of Victoria, Australia. This is just 3 of the c.6500 described species and estimated 10,000+ species of harvestmen that nature has blessed us with.

Note that two of the species here are parasitised by mites. Acarina on Opiliones. Nice.

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Many Little Things all the Way Down...

If you look at little things, always look closer for even smaller things. They’ll be there, minding their own business. If you don’t take any notice of little things then it’s time you did - open a door to a world of wonder.

Here, some tiny little forest fungi (Favolaschia calocera), less than 1 cm (a fingernail) across, and a tiny little lovely oribatid mite. If we could look inside the mite there’d likely be nematodes and, in those, bacteria. Small things all the way down, or from little things bigger things grow.

You decide.

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Wickedly Wonderful Weevily Bits and Pieces...

These are certainly not complete, or even recently alive insects; they are pieces of an as-yet unidentified weevil from the remote Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues (look it up): they don’t even belong to a single individual. They are also minimally 400-500 years old and perhaps as old as 1000 years. They’re from sediment samples rather than sweep nets - subfossil or ‘fossil’ insects that tell us a story of past diversity.

Last September I spent several weeks on Rodrigues with a colleague of mine David Burney taking samples from a collapsed cave called Grotte Fougere. Inside this cave is a pool of water that has been accumulating fossils for as much as 3000 years, almost certainly up to twice as long. Its probably the richest subfossil insect site I’ve seen and I work on subfossil insects for a living (yep). This is great because Rodrigues has been almost completely transformed since humans settled there in 1691.

Rodrigues was home to a large bird related to the dodo - the solitaire - and was covered with several species of giant tortoises. Today the solitaires and tortoises are all extinct and very little indigenous forest remains with many of the forest trees and other plants already extinct or endangered. This suggests that lots of other species have been lost too but without an organic (preserving things like insects and plants rather than mineral bones and snails) it was impossible to tell.

Now we have Grotte Fougere and every day I’m finding exciting things. Dung beetles where there are none today. Giant ground beetles with their nearest relatives almost 1600 km away in Madagascar. Tiger beetles with relatives on nearby Mauritius. And on and on. So much new stuff, so much fun, but with a sadness too because most if not all these new things are extinct - decimated by the consequences of the human use of the landscape and attendant changes: fire, forest clearance, goats, rats, invasive ants. One on top of the other. Some species like the giant carabids probably disappeared rapidly with the arrival of rats. Other species lasted longer until the lowland forest was gone. Some still survive.

Perhaps saddest of all is that we really don’t know the modern fauna well. We know enough to know that the above listed groups are missing but there are still native species hanging on in the remnant patches of highland forest. Hopefully, in a few months I’ll be back to Rodrigues to compare what we can find living with what we find dead.

It’s a grim task but somebody has to do it.