Critters
Temperate white springtail
Folsomia candida
Closed jar only
Tiny white springtails that graze mould and breed fast.
What the simulation uses
- Eats litter
- 0.002 mg/day each
- Dead leaves one animal shreds a day, turning them back into soil.
- Eats mould
- 0.004 mg/day each
- Mould one animal grazes a day, keeping fuzz and grey mould down.
- Colony at most
- 95,000 per m²
- How many the floor can feed when food is plentiful; less food, fewer.
- Starving loses
- 15 % a day
- How fast a colony thins when the jar cannot feed it.
- Eats
- mould, fungi, fungal hyphae, biofilm, decaying plant, yeast
- Foods it lives on; the jar feeds it from whichever of these it has.
- Humidity
- 90 to 100 % RH
- Air moisture it needs.
- Temperature
- 15 to 24 °C
- Comfortable range; beyond it the colony suffers.
- Doubles in
- 10.5 days
- Time for the colony to double with plenty of food.
- Lives
- 175 days
- How long one animal lives.
Care
- Size
- 1.5 to 3 mm
- Moisture
- Moist
What kills it
- substrate drying (cuticular respiration, desiccates in hours)
- standing water / flooding (drowning, surface film)
- sustained temps above ~28 C
- fungicides and pesticide residue in substrate
Description
Every one is female, and the colony needs no males to breed. Eggs hatch in about a week and the young are grown in about three weeks. They are the first to crash when soil dries, so keep it moist but never flooded.
Also called white springtail, temperate springtail, lab springtail.
Estimated, where sources were thin: clutch_or_offspring (source gives ~1000 eggs per lifetime only); population_doubling_days; temp_c optimum and lethal limits; OECD 232 PDF itself was not fetchable (403); 20 C / 28 d test conditions stated from the guideline's known protocol.