In “The Nature of Oaks”, Doug Tallamy suggests an experiment:
To be fair to worm catchers, many of the inhabitants of oak leaf litter are barely visible to the naked eye even though they are everywhere you look. But there is an easy way to observe some of the larger arthropods in the litter beneath your feet: scrape away the top layer of leaves and nestle a white sheet of paper into the spot. After a minute or two your paper will be dotted with dozens of springtails, mites smaller than a period, and whatever other species happen to find the paper in their path.
p. 52, “The Nature of Oaks” by Doug Tallamy
I gave this a try a couple of days ago. See the photo below. I was sorry not to see it work. Maybe I did something wrong — not nestled enough? And this is a different type of leaf litter — mostly Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), not oak — so maybe we’re just a little poorer in terms of critters? I’ll probably try again sometime. I think I have seen springtails other times while gardening in our yard, and we definitely have roly-polies.
Another mystery: why did only one of twelve minipots of coyote bush (Baccharis pilularis) get any sprouts?
There are two batches of seed here, the leftmost column of 4 cells vs the two columns to the right. Maybe the second batch of seed was just no good, but I wonder why identical seed in similar conditions only sprouted in one of four cells on the left. Did it get buried too deep in some cells? Did the seedlings rot in some cells before I even noticed them?
By the way, here are some closeups of the sprouts:
The Wikipedia entry for Baccharis says: “The genus Baccharis is named after Bacchus (Dionysus)”; Bacchus (Dionysus) “is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.” But the Wikipedia entry for Baccharis patagonica sounds a more skeptical note: “Baccharis is an ancient Greek name of dubious etymological origins. It is a cognate of βακχος (Bacchus), and may be in reference to the ritualistic frenzies, called bakkheia, which are inspired by that god. The name is ostensibly in reference to the spicy smell of the roots of plants in this genus.” The wildflower.org page for Baccharis pilularis continues: “pilularis, meaning ‘pill-shaped,’ refers to the round, flat flower heads.”
I release these photos into the public domain. This work is marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.
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