Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [100]
When we reached the narrow entrance, we put out our hands to brace ourselves against the rock—and felt a tickling sensation. Something was moving. As the hair rose on the backs of our necks, we turned our heads. The rocky wall was heaving with brown insects. Tiny brown eyes, crawling legs, and probing antennae.
“Motherfucker!” we heard Alexis whisper from inside the cave.
“Careful of the cave crickets,” Brooke warned.
The cave crickets were only an inch long and didn't have fangs or stingers. They weren't threatening-looking. It's just that there were so many of them, and their antennae were absurdly long—as long as four times the length of their bodies. We experienced a complex emotion: an ancient fear of creepy-crawlies combined with concern that we might squash a rare cave beast.
As we descended through the rocky slot, we tried not to touch or hold anything. It was disconcerting plunging deeper and deeper into darkness, not knowing what might be on either side.
After a few more feet, the rocky slot opened into a small chamber. The four of us barely fit inside—and when Alexis shone his flashlight on the stone walls and ceiling, it illuminated cave spiders and hundreds of crickets.
This area of the cave was called the twilight zone due to the fact that it was not completely dark. When we looked back toward the entryway, we saw a wafer-thin slit of light. That was all that remained of the outside world.
The crickets, Brooke told us, were endemic to the caves of northern Tasmania, usually living near cave entrances in dense colonies. They were considered trogloxenes (troglo = cave, xeno = strangers), because they sometimes went out. Primarily scavengers, the crickets ate moss growing near the cave entrance and dead fellow invertebrates.
We stepped backward to get a broader view of the chamber and suddenly felt the floor—mud, gravel, and rock—giving way beneath our feet.
For a moment, we lost our equilibrium and began falling backward into a deep, lightless hole—filled with God knows what. We grabbed hold of the walls of the rock chamber and, regaining our balance, found ourselves holding hands with what we prayed were cave crickets. From behind, we heard a small rock tumbling down the hole: PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING. Hello? We didn't hear it land. Gingerly, Alexis sidled forward and shined his flashlight down. If there was a bottom we couldn't see it.
“Careful,” Brooke said. “There's a drop there.”
We had nearly become accidentals, like the unwitting wombats and wallabies that fell down sinkholes and ended up becoming food for famished cave creatures. We looked at the crickets in a new light. They were scavengers, weren't they?
“What's down there?” Alexis asked.
Brooke explained that if you went far enough into the caves, you reached the deep zone where no light penetrated and troglobites lived. In the deep zone, it was humid and the temperature was constant no matter what the season. Troglobites had evolved to live in these odd conditions. They often were pale or without pigment. Sometimes they had no eyes. Since no plants could grow in this lightless environment, being an herbivore wasn't an option. Deep zone creatures had two choices: eating each other or waiting until something fell in that they could scavenge upon.
One of the creatures that was beyond our sight was the cave pseudoscorpion (Pseudotyrannochthonius typhlus), a tiny stingerless eightlegged arachnid that over thousands of years of cave life had lost its eyes and pigment. What the pseudoscorpion got