HelpfulGardener.com

Insects, that is...

For a long time we have just played death-from-above, spray and pray, kill 'em all and let God sort them out, but as Jeff points out they have purpose for us we don't think about. Microshredders, predators on nemaotodes and fungi, even movers of eart in the case of ants. Another spoke in the poop loop to add on nitrogen amplification.

Who'd have thunk when we started gardening we'd find nice things to say about bugs? We've come a lomng way baby!

HG

(Haven't read the book, but let me know if he has anything nice to say about...gastropods. )

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

I've been looking at samples from my worm bins to practice using my microscope.


While the very mature finished castings are a bit disappointing, younger material contains a more dramatic mix of critters.

It's in the unfinished vermicompost I've been seeing micro arthropods so tiny they do not fill the view at 400x or even 640x magnification. The extraction into water kills them, but it's easy to see the ones that were already dead as they are covered in bacteria.

Anyway, I just never realized we were talking about stuff this small. Micro-shredding is right!

Next chapter up, Cynthia. And he's not ebullient about them, but they do have a few (very few) upsides...

Toil, I am so glad to see you having fun with the scope. Springtails, mites, all sorts of critters escape our everyday notice but when you go microscopic... WOW!

I miss it...

HG

Well, I found out an answer to a question I just posted in the pepper thread today about how fungus gnats are harmful to plants. It said that the larvae, after feeding on the root-hairs, proceed to then consume the roots and even feed on the stem.

Since some of the micro-arthropods feed on bacteria and fungi (and nematodes and protozoa ), I'm thinking that they really release a lot of nutrients since they probably consume a high volume of organisms to begin with.

However, it said on page 92 "Since most arthropods are food for still larger animals, the total distances microbes can be moved(consider a bacteria colony eaten by a grub that is ingested by a robin) can be truly great." So, it seems like some arthropods release nutrients when they eat the microbes (implying this digestion kills the microbes), but others do not (implying the microbes survive digestion and reside inside the host). In this latter instance, when do the microbes release nutrition into the soil, when the host arthropod is eaten? But the sentence still implies that the robin eating the arthropod still keeps the microbes alive as it helps to transport them even further. Perhaps these arthropods really do not release the nutrients, they just release the bacteria back into the soil when the host arthropod dies. Interesting stuff.