The woods are more than just a bunch of trees, it's a delicate ecosystem full of its own niche species. From earthworms that feed in the forks of trees. To plants that live underground, Paristising tree roots, and only coming up to flower in spring. This is where the majority of life is, completely unseen, but always there. To explore this hidden world you just need to get your hands dirty. Look closely at the cracking in the trees, the moss covered branches, the rotting leaves on the floor, and most rewarding of all, under rotting wood and stones. Just make sure to gently put them back. Here you can find a range of invertebrates, most of which few have ever heard off. From cute globaler springtails, mites that upclose look like they have a nose piercing. Ferocious pseudoscorpions, and gentle pill millipedes. This is the world rarely seen, yet it is all around us. After spending god knows how much time looking under rotting wood, there's an animal that I have only seen 4 times, the jumping bristletail. A weird primeval creature, with large compound eyes, a carrot shaped body, and three tails. It looks rather like the silverfish found in old houses, munching on wallpaper, and precious photos. Yet it is in a completely different order, Bristletails found in the order Archaeognatha, whereas silver fish are found in the order Zygentoma. In taxonomic terms this puts the bristletail further away from the silverfish than you are to a lemur.

What sets them apart from the silverfish I hear you asking. Well the most noticeable is the eyes. In the bristletail, they are large, meeting each other on the sides, as if they had a venn diagram as their eyes. Meanwhile the silverfishes eyes are tiny, hardly visible to the naked eye, and in some there is none. The next is the body shape. The silverfish has evolved a flattened body, most likely to help go into crevices, like gaps in your wallpaper. The bristletail on the other hand has a hunchback appearance. There is also another big difference, one which i found out after finding my first, they can jump, sadly I haven't found much information about the height, due to being an understudied order, yet i can differently say it's enough to lose it in the leaf litter. Where it spends most of its time. Unlike the silverfish which is very happy munching on your house, the bristletail is content on eating organic natural products like lichen, algue, and decaying organic detritus, along with a bunch of other animals, like the springtail and the woodlouse.

It's not just the choices of dinner that relates the bristletail to the likes of woodlice and springtails. It's their age, with woodlice evolving around the Late Paleozoic era, most likely in the carboniferous era. And springtails evolved 380 million years ago in the devonian. It is likely the ancestors of the bristletail were already around by the time the springtail decided to join the party. Sadly I'm not well versed with insect evolution, yet some of the research by people much better at this than me, have found that the bristletail might have helped insects on their path to conquer the skies. While it is obvious that the bristletail lacks wings, some are arboreal like Archaeognatha Meinertellidae of Puru. A group of fascinated scientists found that the ones which were unaltered could glide from one tree to the other, with a success rate of 90%. However, if the bristletail was lacking their median caudal filament also called pointy butt things by me. The success rate dropped dramatically, to around 65%. This could help with our understanding of insect flight, so next time you are amazed by the aerial acrobatics of a robber fly, or the elegance of a butterfly, you can thank the bristletail for its part.