The Urban Pantheist

I'm currently using a second-hand point and shoot camera with a passable macro feature--and here I've put a hand lens in front of it in an attempt to visualize a very small animal.


The animal is a globular springtail (Order Symphypleona*), less than a millimeter long. These charismatic relatives of insects walk about grazing on edible particles, but can jump away suddenly with a lighting-quick flex of their springy appendage, the furcula. Because their predators are also very small and necessarily nearsighted animals, this escape method is virtually teleportation.


This pair of springtails may be eating mold spores growing on the surface of this damp moss. Their surprisingly complex behavior is explored on the BBC series Life in the Undergrowth.


*New Latin symphy- (from Greek symphyēs grown together) + -pleona (from Greek plein to swim

Wilson Mountain Reservation is a protected patch of woods on a stony hill in Dedham. The main entrance has a parking area which is almost always packed with cars full of dog owners taking their pets for a quick ramble up the path, often off-leash. My good friend dedhamoutdoors knows her town well, and took me to the back side of the Reservation, where we didn't see another human or canine soul. Perhaps the persistent light rain helped.

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Springtails on a boardwalk, at Ridge Hill Reservation in Needham. I stopped because I noticed some, then I noticed more, then I noticed that the leaf litter surrounding the boardwalk was covered with hundreds of thousands of them.


Here they are on the grain of the wood of the edge of the boardwalk. Springtails are tiny, harmless relatives of insects. They require moist conditions but are fairly resistant to cold, and so often appear in the winter in huge numbers, when other terrestrial arthropods are rare. I have previously photographed them on the surface of water and on snow.


There were so many of them that when we stopped hiking to take these pictures, we could hear them jumping on the leaves, like the fall of raindrops.

Check out Alexis' amazing photos of this event.

Waterlilies and springtails, Rock Pond, Allandale Woods.

Yup, it was snowy out there. It was easy to take a lot of pictures. I edited myself down a bit, but there are still probably too many, too much the same. We did make a fun animal discovery, so click to continue if you love collembolans. ( Read more... )

Yesterday I took Charlie to Dane Park, a geologically significant piece of land in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Brookline.
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Photos by urbpan.

Urban species #333: Globular springtail Dicyrtoma marmorata

I think this animal is Dicyrtoma marmorata. But there's a very good chance I am wrong. It is minute--the size of the head of a pin--and more to the point, I am not an entomologist. But I am absolutely sure that it is a Collembolan, a springtail, and that it is a member of the family Sminthuridae, the globular springtails. The species designation I am guessing based on some websites I looked at today, especially this one.

Springtails are delightful little animals, six legged creatures which have bottoms which are affixed with a propulsory appendage. They walk about on their legs, but when they need to make a quick escape, their furcula (that's what it's called) launches them a great distance away, very suddenly. Many springtails have the word "flea" in their common names for this reason, but they are not related to fleas. In fact, despite having six legs and antennae, they aren't insects at all, their ancestors having diverged from insects at about the same time that the crustaceans did.

Collembolans are very common animals in compost heaps, and on decaying leaves and other organic matter, but they may be overlooked because of their size. Often they appear rather suddenly, in great numbers. They may be active when it is too cold for most other arthropods, and there are even some species that feed on the algae that grows on snow. Recent studies have shown that springtails play an important role in the reproduction of mosses. They are thought to mostly feed on fungi, algae, pollen grains, and other tiny organic particles. Fascinating springtail social behavior has been recorded with astonishing photography in the documentary series "Life in the Undergrowth." (link contains video footage!)

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