Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
This planet existed for billions of years before we showed up. Earth froze and thawed; it was gashed by glaciers; it was trod by some giant, pretty ridiculous-looking creatures. Since we got here and began tilling the soil and razing forests, building cities and homes and highways, and pushing ourselves out into the vast ocean and up into the endless sky, it’s never been the same.
Our fingerprints are just about everywhere on Earth—and even places beyond.These traces aren’t just the deep, lasting scars or massive, nature-defying infrastructure projects, but also subtle impacts in places we almost never actually visit—ocean crevices, less-trammeled terrain, or even other worlds. Here are three recently uncovered examples of the human knack for disrupting the status quo with even the slightest contact.
Visitors introduced tiny interlopers to Antarctica
Antarctica is a hard place to be a plant. Only around 1 percent of the land is hospitable to plant life, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Mosses and lichens cluster near the shores like emerald blankets, but few flowering plants can make a go of it. Those that can—namely, hair grass and pearlwort—are found far from the frozen interior, in places such as Signy Island, one of the South Orkney group at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Those few flowering plants now have new, more mobile neighbors: Eretmoptera murphyi, a flightless midge. The insect isn’t native to the peninsula, but it’s suddenly flourishing there, significantly outweighing the biomass of the other arthropods there combined (there are a few tiny examples who are native to the continent). Researchers suspect that E. murphyi arrived from South Georgia island by hitching a ride with unwitting humans. “Midge larvae … are tiny and cannot be seen easily with the naked eye,” said Peter Convey of the BAS, in a statement. “Tourists and researchers may be bringing them in from their stopovers in the sub-Antarctic and moving them around the continent in the mud on their boots.” Thousands of scientists and tourists visit Antarctica each year—a drop in the bucket of global travel, but enough to offer plenty of opportunities for tiny insects to thumb a ride. Elsewhere on the continent, scientists and tourists also appear to be tracking in pathogens that are sickening local seabirds.
Does a little midge here or there really matter? At the British Ecological Society conference in December 2018, researchers from the BAS and University of Birmingham suggested that the midges, which have an appetite for peat in moss banks, are increasing the amount of nitrogen in the soil, which isn’t good for those native mosses. Broadly speaking, “mosses don’t like fertilized ground, and those found on Signy Island—as for all Antarctic moss species—will have adapted to a low-nutrient environment,” says Jesamine Bartlett, a polar biologist at the University of Birmingham who presented the work at the conference. The midges, Bartlett said in a news release, are “basically doing the job of an earthworm, but in an ecosystem that has never had earthworms.” Changing the composition of soil nutrients could have rippling…
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