David Liittschwager’s idea of one cubic foot partly started with the idea of having a manageable sample size (the talk was given March 20th, 2014). It is not an uncommon practice to find a limit around observations. So looking at a one cubic foot volume for visible species collecting at different times to find representatives of one day’s time. The size also reflects a common collecting practice of using 5 gallon buckets for collecting, and it is a similar volume.
But in has not turned out to be very limiting. The “dirty secret” for David is that he’s never really finished cataloging within those limitations. The biodiversity that can be found is amazing if we take the time to look. Even a pile of leaf litter in new york city turned up 100 species.
The spots to which he went were chosen by the likes of E.O. Wilson for the biodiversity they know is present. And the most spectacular of these locations have been tropical reefs. He flipped through amazing photo after photo of creatures collected from this little space and carefully sorted out to be identified and photographed.
All those creatures aren’t there all the time of course, but things move and water flows over the reef and through the open skeleton of one cubic foot. Collecting at different times of day and night then going through the process of sorting and identifying and photographing. It took about a month to come up with a representative sample of 24 hours.
David looked up with some chagrin at a leafy acquatic plant, and said they should have spent time looking through the leaves, they would have found a ton more.
More recently he was out just at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay 100 yards west of the GGB, 100 yards south of the north tower, seeing what pass through a cubic foot of water as the tide moved in out, pulling in with a 300 micron net: mites, water fleas, tons of cephalopods, algae, crab and fish larvae, skeleton shrimp. With an 80 micron net they pulled in the glistening forms of diatoms. On a back of the napkin calculation, in a normal 24 hour period of spring tide, nearly a quarter million linear feet of water would pass through that cube — and maybe 2.6 billion creatures would flow through that space.
David’s work in these small spaces shows us a different magnitude of beauty and grandeur, life, diversity, and abundance at scale we would not expect. Another lesson in all that we do not know about the planet we inhabit.
Find out more about David Liittschwager’s work at liittschwager.com.
SF Natural History Series 