Meiofauna means lesser or smaller animals, and Higgins has spent a lifetime challenging such a dismissive descriptor. Photo by María Herranzīut for a group of animals so plentiful, they are little known and poorly understood, except by a dedicated few. Like other meiofauna species, they are integral parts of marine food chains in sediments throughout the world. Kinorhynchs (aka mud dragons) range in size from about 0.13 to one millimeter. A brief walk, say just 85 steps, might tromp over eight and a half million organisms, a number equivalent to the population of New York City. They’re so numerous that under a single footprint on moist sand there could be up to 100,000 individuals. Just a handful of marine sediment is a meiofauna metropolis. They swim through the watery film surrounding each grain, or navigate the terrain of sand and mud-veritable mountains to scale-using suction pads, hooks, or tiny toes. Mud dragons are just one type of meiofauna, animals so diminutive they live between grains of sediment. His specialty is a group of marine organisms called kinorhynchs, aka mud dragons. He spent a lifetime searching for animals smaller than the dot on a 12-point i. And while the world Higgins traveled was large, the world he studied was not. Now 85, Higgins’s dragon-hunting days have passed, but the work he pioneered continues-younger searchers are off on modern expeditions. On the bookshelf, 80 or so small flags stand at attention, lined up like a miniature United Nations court of flags-one for every country Robert Higgins visited in his lifelong quest for dragons. Behind the couch hang four paintings-Chinese landscapes delicately rendered on silk-each depicting a season. The others are “ The Micro Monsters Beneath Your Beach Blanket,” “ Here Be Tiny Dragons (and Other Micro Beasts),” and “ Life Interstitial.”Ī serrated rostrum of a sawfish shares wall space with a dozen or so carved wooden masks from Madagascar, Tahiti, Chile, Peru, and beyond. This article is the fourth in a multipart exploration of meiofauna.
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