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ambience: South African marsh, wildlife, birds

We're listening to the sounds of a marsh at the Mkuze Game Reserve in South Africa. Conservation biologists here are beginning to understand how the survival of an entire ecosystem might depend upon the unseen and unsung activities of millipedes and other tiny invertebrates. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Dr. Tanza Crouch is the curator of Entomology at the Durban Natural Science Museum in South Africa.

"People so often forget that in order to manage a system you have to understand it. The fact that there are seven hundred and fifty thousand described species of insects is a nasty reminder that in fact we’re just one of few creatures on Earth that are not invertebrates. Life on Earth is very much about these creatures that don’t have backbones. They are part of the healthy functioning of every ecosystem. We owe our existence to their existence. And that’s why we need to know who they are and what they’re doing."

Here at the Mkuze reserve, large animals like rhinos, giraffes, and antelope depend upon plant life to survive. The plants in turn, depend on invertebrates to replenish the soil with nutrients.

"Looking just very simply at nutrient cycles gives you some idea of how things work. Millipedes spend their time mucking around in leaf litter, converting a lot of that dead organic matter through their feeding activities to the soil. Good soil makes for good plants, good growth of plant material provides food for larger herbivores. You’ve got this system of interlinking chains and we just simply don’t know what some of these links are, and it's important that we do because if there is going to be any disruption, we need to know what that is."

Dr Crouch and her colleagues are identifying invertebrates like millipedes, and examining their important links to other species at Mkuze. Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Science Foundation.

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