Fear Powers Zombie Bugs
Work with glued spiders and stressed grasshoppers shows how fear can transform an ecosystem even after death.
"Hawlena and his colleagues were surprised by the finding, he told me from his office in Jerusalem. “We double and triple checked every result because it was too good to be true.” Conventional wisdom held that, given the sheer amount of vegetation growing, dying, and decomposing in the meadow, a few grasshopper bodies would be too small to have any effect on the cycle. As the authors note, the hoppers weighed 140 times less than the leaf litter added on top of them—yet they slowed its decomposition threefold. A little stress goes a long way."
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