The Kaspari Lab

The litter biologist, on her hands and knees in the tropical litter, dips low and smells the moist spicy funk of good rot*.  She sees a mosaic of five or six species of leaves, some rounded, some crenulated, in shades of green and brown and the occasional black, one the size of a football but existing only as a lattice of silvery veins, some pinned under a crumbling baguette of a branch sprouting yellow mushrooms and patches of water mold. Slipping her hands into this mixture is like simultaneously sampling an entire produce section of the supermarket: the whisper of dry leaves, the prick of a spine, cool slime, hard crunch, the feathery scuttle of spider making its escape**.

But this is where our foray must stop and our imagination take over. What is that spider seeing? Does she feel first the vibrations of a dozen interconnected leaves before the pink digits slide in, surrounded by an aura of of light?  Does our mite smell the onrush of oxygen rich, dry air as her world caroms about? The maddening thing to the litter biologist is that the 3-dimensional world of litter, so delicate, so easily disturbed, is almost impossible to study without, like Heisenberg’s particles, altering them.

But it must be glorious in there, if a little dark.

FADE IN: A megalopolis at night. The aftershocks have long since ceased, but the damage is breathtaking. Fallen skyscrapers have buried the streets and smaller buildings. Slabs of concrete jut askew into the air, silhouetted in the moonlight. Girders erupt from the rubble.

ZOOM IN: Camera switches to night-vision at an entrance formed where the side of one skyscraper has burst open a four-floor apartment like pomegranate. Debris is everywhere, of every conceivable size. Traceries of rebar frame smaller and smaller chunks of debris, moist from the dripping of ruptured pipes.   Everything is covered by a thin slime, revealing occasional trails and footprints. The way get’s narrower and narrower, impossibly claustrophobic, as crevices, up, down, right and left, glide by. At this point, there is no “correct” path; the point is to just keep going, to find some place where you can breath. Suddenly, you are there. A silent amphitheater opens where one building is improbably supported by two more on either side of the street. Open space swims around you as the camera, looking upward, sees a crack in the ceiling filled with handful of stars, welcoming and bright after the long darkness. Upwards through the crack…

CRANE SHOT: …and into the sky. Slow panorama as you ascend. The world, all of it, bisected by moonlit rivers, is a chaos of surfaces.

* This is something hard to duplicate. Arboretums like the Crystal Palace up the road in Oklahoma City have the obligatory tropical room, full of palms, bromeliads, Heliconias, and hummingbirds. But they smell like a greenhouse. Tropical forests smell like a microbial riot. You will not anytime soon open a Vanity Fair to one of the thick perfume adverts, lift the sticky strip, and enjoy tropical funk. More’s the pity.

**Some litter biologists prefer to wear gloves.

© 2015  Illustration by Brittany Benson

We humans are blessed with huge brains. Those brains are plugged into a handful of sensor arrays–ears, noses, and eyes–which stream gigabytes of information. All of this exists in a platform about (in my case) five and half feet off the ground. It is impossible at times not to feel, as many academics do, that we sit in this lofty control tower, operating the levers and limbs that moves our body about, all in service of the care and feeding of these big brains of ours. This attitude, as Ken Robinson says, would certainly explain the sad spectacle of professors on the dance floor at the end of a conference.

To ecologists who hope to understand how their chosen organisms perceive (I was about to write “see”) the world, this Olympian arrangement of head on a platform is a real non-starter*. To a litter ecologist, our critters are tiny, and they are, literally**, underfoot. If the first step to understanding is to walk a mile in another critter’s shoes, when those shoes are size 0.0000000001W, you have a problem.

Now, when I say the mites and collembola—the most common litter critters—are tiny, this is not in any way to suggest they are unusual. In the evolution of animal life, it is we mega-size humans who are the freaks. The average animal is about 1 mm long (about the distance you can reliably hold your thumb and index finger apart after five cups of coffee). This is well within the size domain of mites and collembola (and the size of a gestating human after about two weeks). Put another way, if the standard height of one story of a building is 15 feet, a 1 mm mite would comfortably live in a one-story bungalow 3 mm tall. The standard 6-foot litter biologist, who just stepped on that bungalow, would tower about 600 stories above the now demolished mite dwelling. And not feel particularly good about it.

Our massive brain observation tower does not provide a good perspective of litter life for the  average isopod, collembolan, or spider.  The ecologist walking through a forest sees litter on the way down: leaves and twigs  swirl by on a blustery autumn day or a branch heavy with moss that crashes to the trail 2 feet before you in an adrenalin surging crash. On the rare occasion in a tropical forest you may experience litterfall writ large when a distant tree gives up the ghost in an eerie slow motion thunderclap, preceded by the popcorn snapping of its attached lianas, and ending in a crescendo roar. All of this mixes together and forms the stuff that we kick through, step over, trod upon.

*OK, the one obvious exception are the ornithologists, who study critters whose brains are, on average, even higher off the ground than ours, and share with humans a dependence on sight and sound as the chief way they perceive the world. No small wonder that birds are the entry-level taxon for so much of ecology. We all start out as bird watchers. The downside, we eventually discover, is that, sharing our bandwidth as they do, birds are also a wee bit persnickety about being watched. This does not bode well for data gathering. This is also why many of us, at some point in graduate school, come to our senses and swtich taxa when we discover that we can collect more data on insects/plants/microbes/protozoa in an hour than we can on birds in a month.

**Let’s just get that pun out of the way early.

 © 2015  Photography by Christian Ziegler

I grew up in the era of cheap plastic toys, the kind you could get from the Dime Store. The Dime Store’s narrow aisles were full of cheap stuff. The lighting was garish and the place smelled of floor wax (not like the overpowering candle-musk of the Drug Store next door).  The cheap metal shelves were low and crowded with boxes and plasticware labeled “Made in Japan”, when that message had a whole different connotation.

The Dime Store was a paradise on those hot summer afternoons after lunches of fried bologna sandwiches, when all three channels ran their soap operas, and we waited for our 3:30 cartoons and reruns of Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island to get us through to dinner. It was deliciously cold.  Square bins of penny candy—licorice, caramels, jolly ranchers, sourballs, Bazooka Joe gum–sat at the end of the aisle next to the cashier, next to a long display of the 5 and 10 cent Snicker bars, Crackerjacks, and other high-end food. It was, a little overwhelming. But, unless you were really hard up for cash, you could leave the dime store with something good.

It was the stuff farther down the aisle that created a deep longing in the pit of my stomach. Before the onset of puberty, I test-drove a whole new set of feelings in the back of the Dime Store. It was the expensive stuff—one dollar and up–and arranged with care. I lifted these items up reverently just to read the packaging, before returning them square on the shelf, or hanging them carefully on the peg with price marked above it.

These were the model airplanes and the dinosaurs.

Revel-brand model airplanes lurked, assembly required, inside shrink-wrapped boxes fronted with a garish watercolor of the plane in action. Side panels described the heroics of pilots, the specs of the planes, the number of pieces, and the skill required to glue it together. All implied the utter joy the assembled plastic plane would transfer into your hand, up your arm, into your brain. The planes held the promise of escape from the tedium of summer vacation. But there was something more. The planes came in a diversity of size and shapes—the fork – tail of the P38 Lightening, the stubby menace of the P47 Thunderbolt, the sleek grace of the P51 Mustang. The planes looked alive. They were not just flown; they flew, as if the pilot were incidental—a part glued in before the clear canopy was affixed to the fuselage.

Next to the model airplanes hung the foot-long bags of dinosaurs. They were made of dense, hard plastic; thrown at a sister four feet away, they could do real damage.  The dinosaurs came in primary colors that made no sense— in books we checked and re-checked out of the library dinosaurs were rendered in grey or muted browns.  But they embodied in three whole dimensions the terrible lizards of our imagination. We could turn them around and over, memorizing details (ignoring their umbilical scar of injected plastic). There was that desire again—to ride on the back of a Triceratops, sit silently in the underbrush while an Ankylosaurus lumbered by, or watch from way, way, far away as an Allosaurus chased a herd of duck-billed Hadrosaurus into a swamp. Arranged neatly on a shelf, or pitted against each other in the strip of dirt next to our house’s foundation, each figurine was a cinder that spark a scene in my mind’s eye.

So to it is today. I settle in at my Leica microscope, adjust the chair, and arrange my forceps, probes, and notebook just so. Sometimes I’ll insert the earphones for some tunes, other times I relish the quiet. I reach for a vial, whose contents come from the litter of a patch of forest from down the road, or far away in the Peruvian Amazon. Unscrewing the o-ring cap, I pour its contents into the glass dish and get a whiff of alcohol.  I slip the dish on the stage and fiddle with the focus. There and then, I am a boy just returned from the Dime Store, staring enrapt at the dinosaurs lying in a jumble on my bedspread.

Illustration by Brittany Benson

© 2015