Leaf Litter Critters

My apologies to the 3rd grade students and teachers at Harmony Hill Elementary in Cohoes for the length of time it has taken me to make this entry. My recent visit to King Elementary in Warwick with 2nd grades got me moving to complete this.

Leaf litter offers a great chance to investigate terrestrial invertebrates. Any wooded area will do for a hands-on exploration. The dead leaves and branches found along the forest floor provide food and shelter for many creatures including centipedes, millipedes, isopods, insects, worms, snails and slugs. All you need is an old white sheet, some large plastic storage tubs, some white plastic food tubs (for example margarine or cream cheese containers), white plastic spoons and small paint brushes.

Collect a bunch of leaf litter in the plastic tubs and dump it on the white sheet. Using plastic spoons or small paint brushes look through the leaf litter and capture the creepy crawly creatures.

Here are some of the creatures that we captured.

Sow bugs are isopods that feed on dead plant material. They might be one of the most numerous of the leaf litter invertebrates. This one is a relative of the rolly polly that is seen in the video below. This isopod can not roll up to protect itself.

Millipedes are plant eating arthropods. The word millipede means thousand legs. Actually a millipede is an arthropod with four legs for each body segment. It looks like this millipede has about 50 segments. How many legs would it have?





Since millipedes are plant eaters they do not have to be as fast a mover as centipedes. Be sure to see how fast the centipede moves in the video below.









The harvest man are not true spiders, although they are closely related. Harvest men are hunters eating other small invertebrates. They kill their prey with a venomous bite. Many people think that harves men have the most poisonous venom of all spiders. This is not true.













Most people think of snails as water creatures. There are many aquatic snails, but there are also terestrial, or land, snails.





Here are two species. Note how they have different shell patterns.





Snails can not come out of their shell. When you find an empty shell, it is the remains of a snail that has died.



Snails eat plants.







Here is a crab spider. They are called crab spiders because the two front pairs of legs are larger than the back four legs. This gives the spider the appearance of have crab-like claws. Like all spiders, crab spiders are hunters, eating other small invertebrates.

Beetles are the most numerous of all insects. This beetle is one of the species of ground beetles. I need to do some research to find the family that this belongs to. When I have I will post it here.

Here are some videos of some of these leaf litter inhabitants.