Brian's Nature Diary for May 2008
Trying to see the wood for the trees.
We are beginning to explore the outermost reaches of space, and we now know much more about the world of total darkness that is the deep oceans, but what do we know about the world of the soil? Those few inches of topsoil beneath our feet without which life would be unsustainable remain almost a complete mystery, even to those whose mission it is to seek them out, and gain understanding.
Take a cubic inch of soil, the true black gold, and there will be uncounted living organisms within it. There may be worms, perhaps a woodlouse or a springtail, even a pseudoscorpion or two, a flatworm, all these are creatures which we are already aware of. Creatures that are visible to the naked eye, or with the help of a magnifying glass. I say we are aware but the truth is that even with this list we move away from the area of “common knowledge” into the area of the expert. What, for example, is a springtail or a pseudoscorpion? The answer is that a springtail is a tiny insect that eats dead plant and animal matter, passes it through its body to add to the humus vital to plants. While a pseudoscorpion is distantly related to the crabs; it sneaks up on an unsuspecting springtail, grabs it with its scorpion-like claws, and eats it for dinner All these beasts are vital for our survival. In living out their unseen, and certainly unappreciated, lives, they perform tasks that are essential. Make no mistake, we could not exist without them.
Yet the human expansion that is taking place over the face of our land at the present time, is daily gobbling up the green envelope as if these, our life-support systems, did not exist. It is as if we were sitting high up on the branch of a tree, busily sawing off the branch that we are sitting on.
There is more, much more, to this incredibly complex community of plants and animals that make life, for “higher” forms, including us, possible. Train the lens of a powerful microscope on our precious few grains of soil and it will be seen to be literally heaving with not thousands, but millions of life forms. Just a few will be of plants and animals already known to the scientist. They will have been written them up and described them in their dry-as-dust formal language, still often Latin, and published in obscure jargon-ridden journals.
But even in a tiny amount of ordinary garden soil there will be species as yet unknown to we humans “new to science” as we put it. So is it important that we do seek to know about them, to raise their profile, to use the in-vogue phrase? You bet your sweet life it is. Without such knowledge it is perfectly possible, with the capacity for destruction, yes even self-destruction, that we have given ourselves, that we will end up tipping the balance of sustainability, so that we threaten our own existence, and that of the other animals we share the planet with. So think on.
As we leave the dark days of winter behind it seems to me that fewer insects are emerging from their winter sleep. Bees seem to be even thinner on the ground than in the sparse recent years, whilst single peacock and brimstones have been the only butterflies I have seen to date. The experts at Butterfly Conservation are predicting that another summer like the disastrous one of last year may bring some species close to extinction in our islands. So lets put our money on having a wonderful summer, benign to our wildlife and also to we humans. |
