Forests in the Grass – The Biology of Small Things

New Zealand has no large predators. When we go tramping in the bush, there are no bears to lunge out of the trees and devour us, no constrictors waiting to drop a lethal coil about our necks from the branches above, no ominous crocodilian eyes watching us hungrily from the water.

The title of this page comes from a nursery rhyme, Playgrounds:

In summer I am glad
we children are so small;
For we can see a thousand things
that men can't see at all.

They don't know about the moss
and all the stones they pass;
They never lie and play among
the forests in the grass.

I came across Playgrounds in a Just Kids children's clothing catalogue, and took an instant fancy to it: I know about moss. I have a degree in stones (although my professors would, no doubt, prefer me to call it geology).

Most of the nature books you'll find in the bookstores, or the shows you'll see on TV, will be about birds or large mammals: everybody seems to love lions and elephants. But nature operates on many different scales. Some of the most fascinating livings things are tiny.

The only movement we are likely to see is the cool, white mist drifting between the dark beech trucks and the fronds of the tree ferns; the only sounds we are likely to hear are the cries of birds … and that is all.

Pterostylis sp. – possibly P. banksii A. Cunn. 1832, although the involute dorsal sepal is atypical, or possibly P. patens Col. 1886.

Tongariro National Park, circa. October 1989.

But the stillness is deceptive. The action is there, alright; around our feet, reaching no higher than our toes. There is an entire, functioning ecosystem playing out within the forests in the grass.

Our "sizeism" is a built-in human bias. Our eyes may overlook whole levels of life's diversity because we ourselves are larger than almost all living creatures except for the few creatures that we capture for our zoos or view on whale-watching expeditions. Yet, if we can sharpen our focus, our unaided eyes – let alone a microscope – reveal a teeming diversity. Though we may have lacked the names for what we saw, which New Zealand child has not spent hours sprawled out by stream or rock-pool, watching the armoured trundling to and fro of arthropods, the mucousy uncertain molluscs, the macabre demise of something caught on a sundew? Whole ecosystems within the circles of our arms.

Here are some favourites.

General Topics

<Systematics>
<Evolution>

Hypopterygium seelandicum – One of New Zealand's native umbrella mosses.
Waipoua State Forest, 1991

Taxa

Pleurothallidinae (Orchidaceae)

Anthocerotae
<Mosses>

Onychophora
<Wetas>

Peripatus Home Page

Biology of Small Things

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