Author: Erica Tennenhouse / Source: Atlas Obscura
Wildlife conservation gets the most attention when it’s focused on the big and exciting—polar bears, condors, sea turtles, elephants. They are our iconic mascots of nature, and ensuring they can survive and thrive requires a massive effort.
But nature and wilderness and loss don’t just exist on that scale. Take a cave in northern Italy called Bùs del Budrio, one among many worn out of the limestone in the foothills of the Alps. In it there was a waterfall, and below that a pool about the size of a one-car garage. And in that natural pool were tiny, white freshwater worms thought to exist nowhere else in the world.
The worms were flatworms called planarians—think back to high school biology class, where their simplicity and ability to regenerate make them useful model organisms for study. Back in 1936, entomologist Mario Pavan discovered some unusual planarians swimming in the cave pool. He sent specimens of the flat, eyeless worms, each about the length of two grains of rice laid end to end, to the University of Pavia, where anatomist Maffo Vialli deemed them members of a unique species. He named the species, known from this single pool, Dendrocoelum italicum. And then no one thought about them at all for eight decades or so.
In 2016, biologists from the University of Milan came across what looked to be another unique planarian species in another cave, about 80 miles away. They wondered how these new flatworms compare to the only other described species in northern Italy, D. italicum. So they made their way to Bùs del Budrio. Upon entering the cave via an old, winding staircase and a long passageway, they were struck not by what they saw, but by what was missing. “The original description of the cave mentioned a pool, but it wasn’t there,” says Raoul Manenti, a wetland ecologist who led the project.
A concrete barrier was diverting the water that once filled the pool. It had been installed back in the 1980s, along with a pipe, to feed the water to a nearby farm. By the time Manenti and his team arrived, the pool had long dried up, and the waterfall was reduced to trickle that fed a narrow rivulet on the cave floor.
The research team scoured the water for signs of the white flatworms, which had been largely forgotten since their discovery eight decades earlier. They weren’t hopeful at first, as conditions were far from ideal—planarians prefer still water, and the rivulet was turbulent and contained little food.
Yet, against all odds, D. italicum had hung on, just barely. In various surveys, the team counted between eight and 109 individuals. It’s amazing that they weren’t yet…
The post The Habitat Restoration Project to Save a Tiny Italian Cave Worm appeared first on FeedBox.