Springtails- chasing giants.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SMALL THINGS
(or how springtails changed my life…)
With no map and no plan, in the middle of a cold, wet rainforest, on the other side of the world, I finally came face to face with a giant springtail…
(What follows is a re-written and expanded version of a piece I wrote on Maptia back in 2017.)
First, a brief introduction.
Springtails
Springtails are nearly everywhere you look. And they’ve been around for a very, very long time. They are twice as ancient as the dinosaurs, being one of the first invertebrates ever to set claws on terra firma. After all that time, they remain pretty much unchanged, uncelebrated and mostly unknown by nearly everyone. Despite their diminutive size, springtails, or Collembola, to give their proper scientific name, can be ridiculously multi-coloured, striped, spiked or intensely patterned. No other member of soil mesofauna comes close. Some are covered in iridescent scales, bright with primary colours or pure white. Others can be covered in long hair-like setae or plump and baldly cute. They all have six legs, many can jump, and are universally renowned by biologists everywhere for being wonderful and sweet and lovely. They live in vast quantities on, up, in and under most things. And while some may achieve 8mm, most springtails are around 2mm and smaller.
A Platanurida species of springtail
A Temeritas species of springtail
Dicyrtomina novazealandae
However, some have exceeded all expectations and become giants.
This is the story about how I got to find the giant springtails and photograph them, half a world away.
Womersleymeria bicornis
HOW IT ALL STARTED
Out and about one day, many years ago, photographing ladybirds, woodlice and flies in South Somerset, UK, I happened to take a random photograph of a strange looking bug that I didn’t recognise. After a bit of an internet search and one Wikipedia article about springtails later, I was entirely won over. Springtails, or Collembola, to give their proper name, were really strange. And bizarre. And beautiful.
From then on, my interest began to focus entirely on them and their complex lives. It rapidly turned into a deep love for the little animals. It was, and remains, all these years later, an involved, fascinating and decidedly healthy obsession.
Over the next year or so, as I photographed more and more springtails, and researched more, I started to become increasingly interested in certain parts of the world that had more unusual springtails than the ones I had so far been photographing. Adelphoderia regina, a globular springtail with a strange neck organ, or another grassland genus, Corynephoria with a mounded digitation on top of its back. And then there were the world’s largest springtails living in the rainforests of New Zealand and Australia, double the size of the European species that I was used to. Eventually, knowing there were impossible giants out there became too much to bear.
On a cold day in February, out of nowhere, my brain decided that enough was enough, we were going to Australia and New Zealand to see the giant springtails and that was that. And after some ineffectual swearing and groaning, I agreed, despite the fact that I hate flying and any disruption to my routine more than anything. I gave myself exactly a year to get it to happen. And with the magic of OCD, that’s exactly what happened.
I was told by everyone that I was acting crazy, that I was just tired and having a few weeks holiday would sort me right out. I didn’t listen or care. Maybe it’s the poetic part of me that every now and again will risk everything and is happy to trust a single tiny moment of idle daydreaming over being sensible. But those moments, when they are acted upon, are the ones that can often end up defining and refining us and our lives, if we’re bold or foolish enough to pursue them. And I did it all for love, the oldest story in the book.
A year to the day after my brain’s decision to travel to New Zealand and Tasmania, I had handed in my notice, said goodbye to my friends, given up my home, got rid of nearly everything I owned and got on a plane. I left it all without a second thought or looking back.
As I sat in my extra leg room seat in early February, 2014, I also didn’t look forwards either. I genuinely hadn’t made a plan for the next few years beyond getting through the next twenty seven hours of flying time without dying in the inevitable plane crash. I had purposely not looked at a map or planned a route. I intended to just see what happened. If, by some miracle I got to the other side of the world without being exploded or drowned, or maybe exploded then drowned, then my dream to finally find and photograph giant springtails could begin. But it felt rather unlikely.
It’s true, I could have spent weeks, taking trains across Europe and Asia and then catching a freighter to Australia and all with no risk of falling out of the sky. It was a choice between either the impossible hell of being around loads of people on trains and ships for weeks on end, or the endless but shortened hell of long-haul flights.
So it was that I found myself strapped down against my better judgement and being accelerated down a wet runway.
Plane journeys are not fun for me. I never sleep. All I feel is damp, unending horror at the thousands of metres of freezing emptiness below my feet. And the flopping arm of someone not accepting the agreed boundary of an arm rest.
Apart from walking, I actually dislike any sort of travelling, whether it’s on a plane, train or bus. I don’t believe that the journey is more important than the destination. It’s just not. I like the stepping stones, not the flooding river. The secure points that allow you to stop and look around without getting wet. The other stuff, the travelling stuff, is to be endured with gritted teeth, a crushing sense of numb-arsed inevitability, and then completely glossed over in the retelling.
After landing in Auckland, I was pleased to discover that I was still alive. Buoyed up by the good news and the fact that I had arrived in a glorious New Zealand summer, I soon got over the jet lag and being half a world away from my home and I began to enjoy myself. I ended up splitting my time equally between New Zealand and Australia, spending a year in each.
Punakaiki rainforest NZ
NEW ZEALAND
Info about New Zealand
Bush in the Coromandel peninsula, North Island
Many people still don’t realise that New Zealand has been in supreme isolation from the rest of the planet for 180 million years. To go there is to experience the closest thing to a real Jurassic Park on the planet. Mammals never happened. The dinosaurs won.
When the Maori found the islands, less than a thousand years ago and began cutting the forests down, they were the first mammals (apart from seals and a ground feeding bat), to have ever set foot on the islands. It cannot be stated enough just how incredible that is. 180 million years of separated evolution, and the only place in the world where birds, rather than mammals have become the dominant land vertebrate.
The largest predator until humans arrived was the now extinct Haarst eagle, the largest raptor ever to have existed in the world, with a three metre wingspan, capable of killing and lifting a fully grown Moa, the main herbivore.
Interestingly, the lack of mammalian hosts has meant that New Zealand only has three rare terrestrial leeches, all confined to pest-free small islands off the coast of South Island, where they have adapted to take the blood of ground-nesting seabirds. One species, probably now extinct, only existed under one rock.
To say that New Zealand is ‘unique’ in the world is a singular understatement. There really needs to be a bigger word to put over the importance that the place should have to anyone studying the natural world.
A NZ robin being an avian pest, trying to steal springtails while I was taking photographs
However, as truly breath-taking as New Zealand is, it has to be tempered with the knowledge that the unique, ground predator-free, bird-centred ecosystem of New Zealand has almost entirely gone. Pandora’s box is permanently open.
New Zealand forests are now legally protected, though a little late in the day. Across the entirety of North and South Island, the once nearly continuous forests have now all been cut down or at best, severely degraded. And the many millions of pest mammals still continue the process, doing their bit to rid the forests of the once deafening cacophony of bird calls. It’s heart-wrenching.
The Department of Conservation are one small beacon of hope. They are at the forefront of pest eradication, trying to protect and save as many native bird and plant species from extinction as possible, with the dream of once again claiming the forests back for birds. It’s an often controversial policy but one that is obviously working, despite emotive and wilfully ill-informed opposition to the controlled aerial drops of 1080, an effective mammal poison and one of the only places where its use makes complete sense. Removing rats, mice, stoats, deer, pigs, hedgehogs, feral cats and possums from native forests using a combination of traps and 1080 means that many ground nesting birds are managing at last to finally increase their populations. The knock on effects for other native fauna and flora are also immeasurable.
Ulva island, just off Stewart Island is one great example of what’s possible. It’s the best place so far to experience a kind of pre-human New Zealand, having been pest-free for twenty years. It’s an exceptional place. Ironically, the bellbirds on Ulva still preserve a cat’s miaow in their mimicking call. Stewart Island is also the only place in New Zealand to experience vast tracts of near pristine, unlogged NZ rainforest.
Holacanthella, NZ’s giant springtails
Holacanthella spinosa sub-adult
New Zealand has five species of giant springtail but all are far rarer than they were, even sixty years ago. After hundreds of years of intensive logging across the islands, any animal adapted to living in decaying tree trunks will be struggling to survive and thrive. And obviously, every other New Zealand invertebrate, plant, lichen, bird and reptile have also been similarly affected. And with climate change leading to longer, drier summers, their future is very much under threat.
As I travelled around, I carefully ignored and avoided every tourist hotspot, the extreme sports, the hobbits, glow-worm caves and widescreen football that drew so many beery, bleary hordes of loud, over-confident backpackers. I genuinely preferred my solitary, rain-filled tourism, exploring the quiet green of the sandfly and mosquito-infested temperate rainforests.
The reality of taking photographs with 9metres of rainfall a year. NZ rainforest
It was worth the bites, the humidity and heat, and then the long months of wet, winter cold and snow, just to be in New Zealand, taking photographs of the things I loved.
Holacanthella spinosa baby
Giant springtails are hard to find, buried deep in decomposing tree trunks or under bark. But due to their size and colour they rather stand out when you do find them. Eventually I did. The excitement was indescribable, but so much so that I messed up the initial shots of the first Holacanthella species I found, which was rather frustrating to say the least. However, it was wonderful to at least see them in real life and not from someone’s inadequate, blurred photos online.
Holacanthella spinosa sub-adult
Over the next few months, it seemed that finding Holacanthella species was usually achieved in the worst of the wettest, coldest days. The photo above, for example, of a sub-adult H. spinosa was taken in Franz Josef in torrential rain and wind under an umbrella, crammed into a hollow tree.
Holacanthella spinosa and Holacanthella brevispinosa
Some of the species exhibit colour forms, variations on the yellow on blue. Here, both the orange colour form of H. brevispinosa and a ridiculously perfect adult specimen of H. spinosa were found together on a rotting Nikau palm leaf, in Punakaiki, on the west coast of South Island. Trying to decide which one to photograph, while the other wandered off was tricky. All giant springtails move quickly and as a photographer, you often only have a few seconds to get some photos before they vanish. I’d already spent years photographing springtails under 1mm so it took a little time to adjust to their considerable size.
Their colours are incredibly bright, as with many of the springtails living in the semi dark of the forest floor. It’s still not known why bright colours are so common in an animal completely unable to see them. It’s likely to be predator selected in some respect, providing a defence, or camouflage.
Holacanthella spinosa mature adult
Holacanthella spinosa
Holacanthella brevispinosa colour form
Holacanthella brevispinosa usual colour form
Not only are all the giant springtails brightly coloured, but they all have a multitude of tubercles, spikes and digitations which would be the envy of any mythical storybook character. Again, it’s difficult to see the advantages in producing such energy-intensive adaptions, but it does make them even more fantastical.
Holacanthella duospinosa mature adult
H. duospinosa has been recorded as reaching 17mm big. Only once did I find a specimen that came anywhere close, and it was this one, found on the Coromandel peninsula in regenerating bush, eating plasmodium, the travelling form of a true slime mould or myxomycete. At around 16mm it was by far the largest springtail I have ever seen. An absolute bruiser.
Holacanthella laterospinosa
Holacanthella laterospinosa baby
The Holacanthella laterospinosa above is only known from two places- the Coromandel peninsula and Cuvier Island, off the coast of the peninsula on North Island. The other four species have a far wider distribution.
Holacanthella paucispinosa, about to moult
Holacanthella paucispinosa baby
Holacanthella spinosa freshly hatched
Finding freshly hatched and baby giant springtails is a little unusual. I was lucky to photograph the ones I did. Here’s a freshly hatched H. spinosa.
The New Zealand Holacanthella species were truly incredible, But after having spent so much time with them, my thoughts began drifting towards one of the Tasmanian giants, Womersleymeria bicornis, a giant springtail that looked uncannily like an actual dragon. Its peculiar name is due to being named after a famous early collembologist, Herbert Wolmersley. I really, really wanted to see it and the other Tasmanian species. So, Tasmania.
King Billy pines, Cradle Mountain, Tasmania
TASMANIA
Info about Tasmania
Separated from mainland Australia for many thousands of years, Tasmania has preserved many species now long gone from the mainland as well as having many endemic species of her own. Nearly half of Australia’s remaining forests, including much of the old growth, unlogged areas are to be found in Tasmania.
Many areas are fully protected against logging, other areas are kept under a more tenuous agreement, or marked as logging coupes.
Logging in the Tarkine, NW Tasmania
In 1982, vast areas of NW Tasmania’s rainforest-rich wilderness were given a coveted World Heritage status, eventually expanding to include around twenty percent of the entire island. This was in acknowledgement of the unique natural and cultural treasures the region contained.
Just a few years ago, the Australian Federal government tried to get that status overturned in order to resume logging in parts of the protected areas. Needless to say, this was unprecedented. No other country has ever considered getting rid of such a sought-after and country promoting honour. Thankfully, last year, the government backed down and reluctantly withdrew their request. Tasmania is the only state in Australia that still commits to the clear felling of some of its native and old growth forests.
Forestry burning, nr. Geeveston, S. Tasmania
Against the traditional background of farming, mining and logging, lives the native fauna and flora, trying or failing to survive within a narrow and delicate band of ecological conditions. Now, Tasmanian wilderness has a potentially far worse problem to deal with- that of climate change. Endemic species are often so precisely adapted for their environment that even small changes can lead to that species dying out. Temperate rainforests in particular need rain to survive, and a lot of it. As summers become hotter and drier, rainforests are losing their usual year-round moisture and can easily burn. And once burnt, they struggle to come back, not being adapted to cope with fires like the eucalyptus forests so the risk of losing species diversity is high.
Tasmania’s rainforests are not hugely rich in tree species, probably due to successive periods of glaciation. However, the trees and shrubs that do make up the forest are endemic and extremely interesting, such as the huge myrtles, sassafras and the celery-topped pines. And then there’s the ever-present Dicksonia antarctica- the glorious weed that is the tree fern.
Tarkine rainforest, old logging coupe, NW Tasmania
However, the forests are rich in diverse endemic fungal and fern life and here it shares a similarity with New Zealand. But obviously for me, the most interesting things are the springtails.
Acanthanura, Megalonura and Wolmersleymeria
- Tasmania’s giant springtails
There are at least six species of giant springtails in Tasmania, and at the moment, three genera. Acanthanura, Megalanura and Womersleymeria are recognised. The entire family is being revised, with some species being described for the first time.
Australian giant springtails have only ever been described from Tasmania. However, there are perhaps up to another fifty more species on the mainland, all as yet undescribed, and likely to be Acanthanura and Womersleymeria species, ranging from deep in the gully rainforest remnants of the Otways, all the way up to Lamington National Park in Queensland. They seem to only occur on the Eastern side of the mainland.
An Acanthanura species from Lamington National Park, Queensland
An Acanthanura/Womersleymeria species, from the Otways, S. Australia.
When I found my first Acanthanura, it was under some decaying bark on a massive fallen tree, in a glade of tree ferns and myrtles. Beyond excited, I lifted my camera up, put my eye to the eye piece and almost immediately felt a sharp stinging pain in my eye. After a few minutes of swearing, I got my phone into selfie mode to try and see through the tears and pick the thing out. There was blood filling my eye and trickling down my face. A small leech had been sitting on my camera eye piece, bitten my eye and now was squashed. My eye was a mess. It was my first experience of being bitten by a leech.
The experience taught me to periodically check my equipment, clothes and legs for leeches. Tasmanian rainforests, as it turns out, are crammed full with them. They can be waiting, draped on overhead leaves, straining and stretching out from tree trunks as you pass by, as well as eagerly tracking your movements from the ground.
If you sit down in the rainforest for a few minutes, you’ll see hungry leeches slowly curving their way out of the leaf litter towards you, hundreds at a time from all directions, while mosquitoes attack from above.
It was in Tasmania that I started using fifty percent Jungle Formula insect repellent. It works.
But, of course, it’s entirely worth the blood and days of itching. To see these amazing animals for real, in a place that truly looks like a primordial heaven is a very special and privileged type of pleasure. And the Acanthanura dendyi I got to photograph was just outrageous.
Acanthanura dendyi, St Columba Falls, NE Tasmania
Acanthanura dendyi, Milkshake Hills, Tarkine, NW Tasmania
This absolute iconic beauty was the first Australian springtail to ever be described, by my collembologist hero, John Lubbock. So far, it’s the only described member of the genus, although Tasmania has at least another two, and highly likely to have many more. The taxonomic task of cataloguing these amazing animals is immense and progresses slowly.
Lubbock also described Megalonura tasmaniae as well as the first from New Zealand, the previously shown Holacanthella spinosa. These were all collected by Arthur Dendy, a New Zealander and a lecturer at Melbourne University and sent to Lubbock in the UK, hence A. dendyi bearing his name. Frustratingly for Lubbock, there were other giant species collected that were too degraded to describe. They would eventually have to wait until Salmon recollected and described them, some forty years later.
As in New Zealand, most Australian species can be difficult to find. Only one seems to remain locally common, in the NE of Tasmania. Most genera seem to be almost exclusively forest species, both in wet eucalypt and rainforest proper, although they have also been recorded in coastal locations and in undisturbed montane regions. I often saw this Acanthanura species, foraging up tree trunks in the darkened daylight of deep forest, looking for slime moulds. All species eat myxomycetes exclusively, including NZ’s Holacanthella species.
An Acanthanura species uncovered deep below a tree base
A juvenile Acanthanura species
Acanthanura species, eating slime mould nr. Westbury, N Tasmania
This species appears to be perfectly happy under logs in disturbed and logged forest as well as at the edges of cleared and farmed grassland. There can often be eight or nine in and under a single fallen log. They also seem to spend some of their lives at least, living between the roots at the base of certain native trees, up to twenty centimetres down. Definitely the most adaptive of all the species I photographed.
Then there is this species below, looking very similar, but with the tips of the digitations lightly pigmented yellow.
Acanthanura species, Scottsdale, NE Tasmania
Acanthanura species ‘sleeping’, Scottsdale, NE Tasmania
Every now again, I would come across a single specimen of Megalanura tasmaniae strolling along. Unlike the rest, its digitations are shortened and pleasingly rounded off. Their delicate speckled skin pigmentation, with the small, lighter, round spots is significant enough to be mentioned by Lubbock in his description.
Megalanura tasmaniae
Megalanura tasmaniae, running
But of course, as is often the way of these things, W. bicornis eluded me for months. Then, finally, a few days before returning to the UK, at the Milkshake Hills reserve, NW Tasmania, there it was.
Womersleymeria bicornis
Distinctive, with their elongated, brightly coloured digitations and dragon-like look, W. bicornis is the gaudy star of Tasmanian giant springtails. My internal i-Spy guide was pretty much complete.
Unlike the other Australian species, their antennae are also elongated, at least twice the length of the other genera.
W. bicornis
Above is a video of W. bicornis, complete with rainforest birds.
W. bicornis
When I returned to NW Tasmania at the end of 2015, it was to a dusty, dry Tasmanian spring. And it got worse quickly. Watching the rainforest in the Tarkine slowly dry out over those weeks was awful. When I left in January, it was a week before multiple lightening strikes started another global tragedy. Many irreplaceable and precious hectares of alpine wilderness and rainforest were destroyed in the fires. Now it’s gone. The alpine areas will most likely never grow back. The rainforest, if it recovers, will take up to a thousand years to return. With climate change being a horrible reality, it’s highly likely that rainforest fires will become far more common in the years to come.
These Womersleymeria bicornis above were all from that area.
A FINAL THOUGHT
On my travels, I unexpectedly found myself falling deeply in love with two flawed and great countries. Australia, especially Tasmania, and the island nation of New Zealand. The natural biodiversity that both countries still retain is genuinely startling. There’s a wild, joyful abundance and strangeness in everything that grows, hops, wiggles, swims, flies and crawls there. I’m immeasurably grateful to have had the chance to experience it for myself.
Giant springtails are iconic, yet almost completely unknown in their native countries. They’re at least as fantastic as the newly discovered snails, beetles and spiders that make the news almost every day. It’s about time they had their moment in the sun. Though they’d actually prefer their fame away from the spotlight, inside a log.
I also want to mention here that as yet, unbelievably, no giant springtail has any legal protection, despite the fact that they are unique, incredible and unusual animals and are slowly but surely disappearing in Australia and New Zealand. The FAO, ITPS, GSBI, SCBD, and EC’s State of knowledge of soil biodiversity - Status, challenges and potentialities, Report 2020 is an important step towards gaining recognition and protection, not just for Holacanthella, Acanthanura and the other giant springtails, but for all soil biodiversity, and promoting the importance of soil animals and soil health worldwide.
I started writing this article because of wanting to share my love about some tiny animals and the giants that walk among them. I wanted to finish by saying something about habitat destruction, the chipping away at the legal protections for our wild places, about the power, ignorance and greed tied up with governments across the world but I’m not going to. Either you’ll agree with me and you’re on the side of beauty, love and compassion, or you’ll want to stamp around with big boots just to make sure that all the giant springtails are squashed. That’s the world we’re living in now. One of absolutes, black and white, good and evil, springtails and mites.
So, instead, I’ll say this. My curious love for an animal usually no bigger than a particle of dust grew out of finding them beautiful. And then I found them inspiring, in that they gave me a reason to change my life and do something out of the ordinary. So I think that’s the point. Notice, enjoy and appreciate the small things in your life. They’re often more important than you realise.
W. bicornis from behind, mid excretion….