David Littachwager and Susan Middleton, 1993
Madison cave isopods (Antrolana lira) showcase/public outreach for cave week. We set up an aquarium for visitors to a popular cave and did a little spheel. MCI are a federally endangered species that live in karst aquifers in Virginia and West Virginia. They're a really cool species that we know fairly little about. The most notable fact is that they have marine ancestors so unlike most cave isopods which have freshwater ancestors, these guys came from the sea!! They're also a really old species. Probably older than the cave that we were showing these guys off in. Rather aggressive hunters that, like most cave obligate species, will devour almost anything put in front of them, including their own kind! They have one short and one long antennae and a few different theories for cave colonization that I'm happy to get into if someone is curious. What's really interesting to me is that there are 3 leading theories and each of the theories cover one of the 3 types of cave colonization (accidental, adaptive shift, climate relict). Makes it really cool to explain a bit about how cave colonization occurs to tour groups. The strange thing in the stocking is a shrimp, which is the bait for the trap and the stocking ensures they don't each it all, because they will, because they're ravenous and once ate a whole deer in a single week.
Additional fun facts, they're considered federally endangered because they were originally only known to two locales in the same area but the range has since expanded across VA and WV, not because they are reuthlesslt colonizing new territory, though I wouldn't put it past them, but because significant effort has gone into finding them when possible. They're also probably in mant other locales but because we don't always have aquifer windows it can be hard to say. They're also an indicator species for good water quality, which doesn't necessarily mean I'd drink straight from a spring of this aquifer, but is a good sign that their federally endangered status has allowed this aquifer some breathing room, if only a bit.
Anyway this is my job now. going into caves, looking for caves on the surface, doing biosurveys, dye traces, bat counts, cave surveys, public outreach, etc. I like it a lot!
David Littachwager and Susan Middleton
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