The subject of this week's Sunday Spinelessness is one of the most important organisms in the world:

Ok, so the photo doesn't do the little guy justice, but in my defence he is about 3mm long. It's a springtail (Collembola) - a member of a group of arthropods closely related to (but distinct from insects). They get their common name from a long forked organ, the furcula, that usually sits folded up under the abdomen. When you disturb a springtail the furcula "fires", pressing down on the ground sending the animal off "like a madly bouncing full stop" in the words of Sheila Natusch.

There are tonnes of reasons to place springtails among the most important animals in the world. The earliest fossil hexapod, and one of the first terrestrial animals, Rhyniella praecursor, is (almost certainly) a springtail and Gomphiocephalus hodgsoni (affectionately referred to as 'Gomph' by Nick Demetras at last weekend's Molecular Ecology meeting) is the largest permanent resident of the Antarctic mainland but themost important thing to know about springtails is the role that play in making soil.

That's probably typical of soil anywhere on earth - a couple of species of springtail along with two mites (you might need to click on the photo to see a high resolution version to see the second mite species). In fact, it's been estimated that there are as many as 100 000 springtails in each square metre of soil in every terrestrial habitat on earth! They eat decomposing meterial in soil, acting to free up the nutrients in plants and fungi as they grow and returning them either to the soil or to small soil predators (centipedes, spiders...). Experiments have shown that springtails play a key role in such "nutrient cycling" in many ecosystems.

As I've said the photos I've shown you here really don't do springtails justice. Thankfully, in putting this post together I've discovered a cache of much better photos. I uploaded my photos for this post to flickr a few weeks ago and received a comment not long after from Belgian collembologist Frans Jessens asking me to geotag the photos to include in his impressive project to map the world's collembola. There are some stunning photos on that map so be sure to check them out. And finally, if your sunday is just not spineless enough then check out the Circus of the Spineless - a month's worth of bugs and critters from across the blogosphere

Labels: collembola, environment and ecology, mites, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

I have three talks to present next week so today's edition of Sunday Spinelessness will be short and sharp. In fact, here's an animal I can't say very much about at all, it's err... a millipede:

For an invertebrate evangelist being able to identify an animal only as far as 'millipede' is sort of like a being a cheerleader for the cute and cuddly and identifying a fury creature as "definitely being some sort of mammal" - faintly depressing. It's only thanks to the arrangement of feet that I can even get that far - centipedes have one pair legs per segment while this guy, and all millipedes have two. Interestingly*, despite the Latin roots of their names no millipede has as many as a thousand legs and, because they always have an odd number of leg bearing segments, no centipede has exactly a hundred.

Be sure to click on the image to see it in higher resolution.

*for certain values of interesting...

Labels: might interest someone, millipede, myriapod, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness

For reasons that are still not entirely clear to me I ended up on the organising committee for three meetings this month. For the two meeting I had the most to do with I ended up preparing the program. This meant collecting an collating abstracts from all the speakers, pasting them into a new document and suffering long silences from the printshop after asking them to get each program finished in an unreasonable length of time.

It's actually been kind of fun hearing all the exciting things that people are up to around the country but I thought I should offer this post as a warning to anyone who, like me, finds themselves doing something like this for the first time and thinks that abstracts will roll in as a steady, manageable stream over a few weeks before the deadline. Here is the a plot of the number of abstracts received for each meeting relative to the deadline for that meeting:

Labels: sci-blogs

It's been a bit of a wintry Sunday here in Dunedin so I'll dedicate today's round of Sunday Spinelessness to a group of insects we should see a lot more of as summer takes hold, the Damselflies (Odonata:Zygoptera).

Labels: damselflies, insects, might interest someone, Odonata, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness, Zygoptera

s Lately I've been trying to get some photos of the wolf spiders that scurry about in the bark chips we use as mulch on our garden. Unfortunately those guys are camera shy, really fast and pretty well camouflaged so I don't have any photos of them worth sharing with you but it's amazing what you see when you sit down and wait for a little while. It turns out I'm not the only one keen on our garden's spiders, while I was failing to photograph them a solitary wasp (as opposed to a social one, though there was also just one of them) had gone into the garden to find a suitable host for its larvae and got itself into a lot of trouble - it was crawling out with a worker ant (possibly the endemic species Monomorium antarcticum) attached to its hind leg.

Labels: ant, photos, sci-blogs, sunday spinelessness, wasp

Last month we heard about the worlds only known vegetarian spider - a remarkable discovery given the lengths to which the other 40 000 described species go to make animals into meals. There are the familiar web builders from the family Aranediae, active hunders like jumping spiders, the ambush hunting trapdoors and tarantulas and even the bolas spiders which produce a pheromone to attract moths so they can cast a sticky trap at them and, having caught them, draw them in like fish on a line. The subject of todays Sunday Spinelessness are the crab spiders, a family (Thomisidae) of ambush predators that use camouflage and a good deal of patience to get themselves fed.

The crab spiders get their name their name from those elongated front legs which are used to seize and hold on to their pray and from their tendency to scuttle about when disturbed. Most of the larger species, like the two above, hang out inside flowers waiting for would-be pollinators to get close enough for the spider to pounce. In fact, some crab spiders might even mimic the nectar guides of flowers to increase the rate that insects visit their flowers.

Some of the smaller crab spiders like the really tiny one above (probably from the consonant deficient genus Diaea) also hang out in flowers but others hide in the joins of bark, in the leaf litter or, like this one, in fronds of herbaceous plants. I'm not quite as patient as a crab spider so I don't have any photos of them in action but, as ever David Attenborough has a video on the topic:

Labels: crab spider, might interest someone, photos, sci-blogs, spider, sunday spinelessness

Labels: bellbird, evolution, human genome, Korimako, population genetics, sci-blogs, science