Discovering the world around me.
Wherever I walk on Owl Acres, there’s a living web under my feet holding it all together. That web is created by a particular type of fungus called mycorrhizal fungi. Sometimes they pop up various varieties of mushrooms like the beloved morels, but generally they are busy doing other things. Mycorrhizal fungi consist of a […]
Continue reading Soil Part 6: Mycorrhizal Fungi
Macrofauna are the larger critters living in the soil on Owl Acres. We are familiar with most of them. Millipedes, centipedes, true spiders, ants, earthworms, certain beetles, harvestmen ( AKA Daddy Longlegs) wood lice, termites, slugs, and snails. Along with these soil lifers, larvae and nymphs of many insects live and grow in the soil […]
Continue reading Soil Part 5: Macrofauna
Continuing with the plan to divide the animals that live in the soil by size, we come to the meso or middle-sized fauna. Whereas the microfauna we met—protists, nematodes, water bears and rotifers—live in water in the soil, the mesofauna we’ll look at live in air-filled pores in the soil. Now we’re starting into the […]
Continue reading Soil Part 4: Mesofauna
On a human scale, we think of the size of creatures populating the earth as ranging from gnats to whales. The ecosystem in the soil has a comparable scale, with creatures ranging from the tiniest virus to large digging mammals. Scientists divide them into groups depending on their size—micro (tiny), meso (middle-sized), or macro, the […]
Continue reading Soil Part 3: Microfauna
In my last biology class, many years ago, I learned that there were two kingdoms of living things—plants and animals. Oh how wrong that thinking was. Life is so much richer than just plants and animals. Today scientists divide living things into three domains—archaea, bacteria, and eucarya–and then things get complicated. Eucarya (multicelled organisms) divide […]
Continue reading Soil Part 2: Microorganisms
It’s easy to look around at all the life on Owl Acres—the trees, the birds, the rabbits and moles, the deer, the grass, the flowers, and everything else–and think “wow, what abundance, what mystery, what wonders.” It’s a little more challenging for me to remember that there’s an entire universe on a different scale right […]
Continue reading Soil Part 1: Dirt