The tiny overlooked creatures who play a vital role in nature
While the larger life forms on Earth can dominate conservation concerns, tiny, often overlooked creatures play vital roles, writes Andy Brown.
The natural world that we live within contains some very large creatures that range from ancient Sequoia trees that live for over 2,000 years, blue whales that are bigger than the largest dinosaur, and elephants that could trample us with ease.
It is, however, the small stuff that dominates existence because of the enormous numbers of tiny individuals that collectively make up so much of the life on our planet.
Many of these creatures are absolutely fascinating when looked at closely and they all have as much right to exist as we humans do. Their lives can have enormous consequences for our own existence.
The sheer complexity of even the smallest of life forms is astonishing.
The first time anyone was able to look closely at a tiny insect was when Robert Hooke in the 1660s used the first decent microscope to stare at a flea.
He drew the body design on a large enough scale for his readers to be able to see clearly the wonderful sophistication of the tiny creature.
That inspired Swift to write that “great fleas have little fleas on their back to bite em and little fleas have lesser fleas so on ad infinitum”.
Using early lenses enabled scientists to get up close and personal with the detail of the lives of insects and helped reveal how vital processes such as pollination operate.
It turned out that without insects that most people rarely think about, such as dung beetles, we’d be knee deep in unpleasant substances.
Tiny wasp parasites were discovered to have hugely important roles in controlling the numbers of other insects that might destroy our crops.
As microscopes improved it became possible to look even closer at how life was designed.
A simple substance such as soil, that had been thought of as just lifeless dirt, was suddenly revealed to be teeming with vibrant life forms.
We now know that there are more creatures in a teaspoon of soil than there are humans living on the entire planet.
Because of the sheer volume and variety of the creatures that live in our soil we still don’t know the life cycle of the vast majority of them.
There has simply never been enough time and funding to study them in detail. So, we don’t know for sure what happens to these creatures when we spray pesticides onto land.
What we do know is that soil containing a healthy variety of life grows healthy crops. Almost all plants depend on developing partnerships with tiny soil organisms such as funghi and struggle to survive without them.
Soil needs its complex community of tiny organisms and when we deplete that variety it can be extraordinarily hard to restore it.
It is, however, in our oceans that some of the most mind-boggling numbers of creatures exist and they have turned out to be key driving forces for almost the whole of life on the rest of
our planet.
The most numerous vertebrate on the planet is the small bristlemouth which is a fish that lives in the middle depths of the oceans where it glows in the dark. There are thought to be hundreds of trillions of them.
There are 12,000 different species of tiny crustaceans in the ocean that exist in enormous quantities providing food for everything from giant whales to small sardines.
Yet even these vast numbers are dwarfed by the countless multitudes of bacteria that thrive in open oceans and the armies of different kinds of plankton.
Most people know that forests are responsible for producing much of the oxygen that we breathe on this planet and for absorbing carbon dioxide.
Less of us think often enough about the even bigger quantities of oxygen that are released by ocean organisms and the important role they play in generating the rain clouds that our agriculture depends upon.
Life on earth would simply not be possible for humans if anything happened to interfere with their lifestyles.
The importance of the small things in life is particularly evident when it comes to our own bodies.
Inside you as you read this will be several pounds of different minute species that are collaborating with your body to enable you to live.
Most of us think of ourselves as a single individual human existing separately from other creatures.
We are in fact an assembly of collaborators and we could not absorb our food or fight off the simplest infection without the help of the small stuff.
So small isn’t just beautiful. It is necessary.
We take the existence of our tiny companions for granted very much at our own peril.