>From San Antonio's newspaper... Mike Quinn, Austin ----------------
Cricket watchers say caves may need expanded buffer Web Posted: 09/11/2005 12:00 AM CDT Jerry Needham Express-News Staff Writer After staying cooped up in a dark cave all day, crickets are willing to travel far and wide for a good meal. Cave crickets that share living quarters north of San Antonio with more than a dozen other creatures that have landed on the nation's endangered species list - spiders, beetles, psuedoscorpions and daddy long-legs - go twice as far as thought looking for food, according to a new study. And that, the scientist who tracked them says, could require that even more land be set aside to protect those endangered species. A team of researchers led by Steven Taylor, an entomologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that the little brown-and-white hoppers travel up to 350 feet from the cave entrance in their nightly search for food. Previous research had indicated that most crickets stay within 164 feet of their cave openings to feed on fruit, dead animals, insects or animal droppings. The crickets - often found by the thousands in Central Texas caves - are important sources of food for their roommates. Their droppings, eggs and dead bodies provide nutrients for the other creatures. Just how did the scientists keep up with crickets in the dark? They caught more than 2,000 of them as they came out of a cave at Fort Hood, marked them with water-based fluorescent paint and let them go. Over the course of 17 nights, they located the marked crickets using portable black lights. Although half of the marked crickets were found within 130 feet of the cave entrance and 90 percent within 236 feet, a few hungry critters were found up to 350 feet away, the researchers reported. That's quite a journey for a creature hardly more than an inch long. "Our findings suggest that a relatively large area may be needed to protect the crickets' foraging area and to shield them from fire ants," Taylor said. "Based on the foraging range we saw, we believe that cave resource managers may wish to create buffers around the footprint of a cave - not just the entrance." His findings on Ceuthophilus secretus were published this week in the journal American Midland Naturalist. But Bob Pine, supervisor of the Austin office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the findings probably wouldn't change how the agency goes about protecting Central Texas caves that contain endangered species. He said that besides the crickets' eating habits, the wildlife service takes into account a number of factors in determining the area that needs to be left undisturbed around a cave opening. Those include the vegetation, the surface and underground drainage patterns and the underground footprint of the cave. "Vegetation is more of a determiner for the area of the buffer than the crickets' foraging," Pine said, noting that the buffer around protected caves in Bexar County is 40 acres. "The vegetated surface area is what provides the nutrients that go into the cave," said Sybil Vosler, a biologist with the federal wildlife service. "Bare earth or concrete is not going to provide any nutrients." Pine said knowledge of the crickets' needs would help in drafting future agreements written to protect cave habitats. "Some of the things that might be influenced by these findings are fire ant control and pesticide usage around caves," he said. ----------------------------------- original text http://tinyurl.com/7qcl4 Use following to bypass login: [email protected] 123456 http://bugmenot.com/ To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to mailto:[email protected] with the following message--unsubscribe cavetex. For help and information go to www.cavetex.net. List administrator: mailto:[email protected]
