Wild Weekend - Bill's Mother's Supporter's Supplement - 5th April 2026
In praise of superheroic springtails.
Welcome to today’s supporter’s supplement, with many thanks to Dr Paul Ardron, a soft spoken source of local knowledge in many fields, woodlands, moors and as he describes here, inner space.
Across the world, there’s a huge volume of tiny gaps between stones, leaves, rocks and soil particles that we lumbering humans rarely notice.
But Paul does, and in this article that he’s kindly shared with us (along with his amazing photos), he gives us what he jokingly calls his Ode to Springtails, one of the most prolific creature to inhabit the world’s inner space. (We also have a shorter piece about these fabulous beasts in our main Sunday post coming soon for all readers this morning).
By some estimates there are over 100,000 tiny springtails in every square metre of dampish land. My circumspect contacts shake their heads and put it at probably just tens of thousands at a good (for springtails) square metre, particularly if you dig down a bit. But don’t forget they can live on water too.
So a little inexpert maths on my part says there could then be at least 7,447,000,000,000,000,000 of them out there. Something like that, give or take a few noughts. That’s what we mean by prolific. And had you even heard of them before today, never mind knew about their superheroic powers?
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