culturing large neanuridae

[hecklad]

I just found some very large springtails and would like to culture them. Does anyone here have experience with this type?

 

[wizentrop]

They like decomposing wood substrate and dried yeast as food.

 

[hecklad]

They like decomposing wood substrate and dried yeast as food.

Awesome, already got the decomposing wood. I think there's some yeast laying around the house somewhere too. Thanks for the help! Any idea how long it takes them to reproduce?

 

[wizentrop]

They are VERY fast. You'll see if they are happy if they hang around the yeast

 

[MasterOogway]

Those are awesome.

 

[ShyDragoness]

Oh my god they're so cute!!! I want some!

 

[coniontises]

Neanurids appear to be myxomycete specialists; see https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11957. Physarum polycephalum, the myxo used in the paper, is a popular laboratory model organism and thus often sold commercially by biosupply companies.


@wizentrop Just curious, did your Holacanthella captives accept Physarum before they perished?

 

[hecklad]

Neanurids appear to be myxomycete specialists; see https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11957. Physarum polycephalum, the myxo used in the paper, is a popular laboratory model organism and thus often sold commercially by biosupply companies.


@wizentrop Just curious, did your Holacanthella captives accept Physarum before they perished?

So they need slime mold? There was some close by where I found the neanurids. Should I collect that and try to culture it?

 

[coniontises]

I'm not sure "needs" is true, since presumably they could ingest other sources of proteinaceous sludge; however, myxo slimes are clearly extremely beneficial to them. Do be careful w yeast though. Since the paper says they cannot digest fungal cell walls (note: any website claiming slimes are fungi is outdated) they may feed only on nonfungal parts of the yeast granule and thus leave messy scraps everywhere; use appropriate precautions.

Since Physarum polycephalum is a viable rearing food source for a number of unrelated Neanuridae, I suggest you just buy some online if you feel lazy. However, I do recommend raising wild slimes; P. polycephalum steals all the attention and research grants, and thus most other myxos are very poorly studied scientifically; you could easily discover some interesting phenomenon or another. Furthermore the neanurids are probably more adapted to local slimes than polycephalum, unless your local slimes include polycephalum. Do make sure you avoid mistaking abiological and plant-created fluids from myxomycete slime though.

Papers I've read imply that most slimes with phaneroplasmodia can be kept similarly to polycephalum in the lab.

 

[wizentrop]

@wizentrop Just curious, did your Holacanthella captives accept Physarum before they perished?

Holacanthella are saproxylic organisms feeding on decomposed wood, and are associated with Southern Hemisphere Nothofagus trees. They do not feed on slime mold.

they may feed only on nonfungal parts of the yeast granule and thus leave messy scraps everywhere; use appropriate precautions

This is a bold statement. Are you speaking from experience? While the paper mentions difficulty of the neanurid collembola to digest fungal cell walls, it does not mention any massy scraps as a result nor calls for caution. My neanurids were fine feeding on the yeast (baking yeast, yes?) once it started growing (="melting"), and wiped it clean.
Funny thing, I actually have a photo of that... The blob on the right is 2-day old yeast being eaten. The collembola cluster on the left has already finished whatever food was there.

 

[coniontises]

I was not attempting to make a bold statement; it is speculation (the word "may" is used as "perhaps" here). In any case, at least we can agree that standard largely yeast-based collembolan rearing methods are insufficient for culture of a considerable number of common neanurids, not including yours..?

Pardon my inexpertise in collembolan taxonomy, but are there visual features that allow Neanuridae to be easily distinguished from other similar wrinkled puffy Poduromorpha?

 

[wizentrop]

In any case, at least we can agree that standard largely yeast-based collembolan rearing methods are insufficient for culture of a considerable number of common neanurids, not including yours..?

That is an even bolder statement than the previous. And no - I disagree. What is "standard largely yeast-based collembolan rearing methods"? Do you have a link to a written protocol?
You saw a paper reporting about keeping a single neanurid species on slime mold (or 7 total if you include the Australian species in the supplementary information), and you extrapolated the result to the family level. That's a big no-no in science unless you have more evidence. Even if you only glance at the discussion section of the paper, you will see that the authors are very careful, using phrases like "at least one species", "is able", "it is likely that". I read the whole thing and the authors themselves are not really sure how to explain the variation in size and reproduction rate between the two test groups. In other words, the fact that their collembola reproduced on slime mold does not make it better than an alternative diet - in their case, algae-covered bark. In my case, yeast.

In my experience yeast-based diet is sufficient for keeping 7 different species of Neanuridae (mostly North American ones, 2 were from NZ) and have them thriving for up to 4 years. Do I think all Neanuridae can be kept this way? Absolutely not. Someone asked for advice and I responded. That being said, go back and read what I said. In fact, here I'll paste it for you -

You'll see if they are happy if they hang around the yeast

If you need a resource for collembola taxonomy this is your site.

 

[ShyDragoness]

things are heating up in the neanuridae community

 

[wizentrop]

Nah, I'm just oversensitive to misinterpretation of scientific papers, hehe

 

[MasterOogway]

This whole discussion makes me all warm and tingly inside.

 

[coniontises]

At the risk of making this thread start to look even more like one of those infamous silly Arachnoboards wars,

- the muscorum second generation was smaller than the first; the authors did speculate that this might be caused either by a pure slime diet being nutritionally suboptimal or by various weird laboratory effects. However, they then go on to list several factors which "strongly support slime mold as a food resource". As far as I can tell, they are implying that any weird laboratory effects that could have occurred do not appear strong enough to cause the entire control group to refuse breeding and grow slower than the experimental group ("Successful rearing and maintenance would not be possible if insufficient nutrition was provided [in the slime diet]. The bark-fed control group demonstrate that, when nutritional resources are poor, little growth and no reproduction occurs.")

- As for standard yeast rearing protocols, they are ones cited in the paper: "Members of the Neanuridae have ‘suctorial’ mouthparts (sensu Macnamara28) and, unlike the majority of Collembola families, lack a molar plate, which is necessary to process hard food items46. The molar plate enables non-neanurid Collembola to subsist on a generalist diet47,48 and hence be reared on standard algae-covered bark and yeast diets12,13,37. By contrast, Neanuridae mouthparts form a tube-like structure49,50 that is better suited for piercing and sucking8." I have no idea how yours manage to survive and breed by feeding from yeast pellets but they are evidently not dead.

- The authors explicitly stated somewhere in the article: "While algae-covered bark is clearly not a suitable food source for neanurid springtails..."

- Seven different neanurids from different tribes is what I meant by "a considerable number". Plus, the authors state that muscorum's behavior in captivity is the rule and not the exception, which means it is indeed safe to extrapolate to family here: even though it is a "weedy" invasive and thus highly adaptable to unusual conditions, indigenous collembolans in the area could be kept similarly. They also even suggest that their slime mold method could possibly be used on non-neanurid Collembola with similar sucking mouthparts.

 

[wizentrop]

I have no idea how yours manage to survive and breed by feeding from yeast pellets but they are evidently not dead.

Well isn't the natural world amazing?
This is why I am not a fan of sensational papers published in Nature and Science (although, Science is definitely the better one of the two). They are more overhyped "scoops" that are supposed to stir up and sometimes even confuse the scientific community and by doing so... sell more copies. My personal opinion of course.

I like how you decided to sarcastically refute my observations, because you read something different in a scientific paper. That is a great scientific approach, sir...
Ok, here's a kicker for you. I went to each one of the cited papers that mention the "standard rearing protocol". None of them mentions yeast. All three papers mention algae-covered bark (no surprise here), and one of them mentions *surprise surprise* slime mold. So this Nature paper isn't really a novel rearing method? Scratching my head here. Not sure why the authors decided to include the word "yeast" in the discussion when they cannot support their claim.

the authors state that muscorum's behavior in captivity is the rule and not the exception, which means it is indeed safe to extrapolate to family here

And I absolutely disagree with this, no matter what the authors say. You cannot take a single species' behavior and extrapolate to a family of ~1500 species, especially when one of the tribes within that family is a known saproxylic as mentioned above. Sorry.
The point of this paper is to present a novel method for rearing Neanuridae in the lab and facilitate a discussion about the topic. It is not, however, to declare this new diet as the only rearing method for all Neanuridae.

This is not an attack, by the way. I asked you above if you had any personal experience with Neanuridae husbandry that you want to share. I am happy that you mentioned this paper, this is something that we need to see more and more in the forums. However, I encourage people to practice their critical thinking skills as well and collect more information because we really know close to nothing about most of these tiny invertebrates. Not everything is set in stone once published in Nature, this has been proven many times in the past.

 

[coniontises]

I was not attempting sarcasm or trying to refute all your claims.

Never mind the yeast part, I freely admit to having failed to check the references mentioning standard yeast/bark protocol for the presence of yeast; I will say that the

 

[coniontises]

...use of extrapolation here was in a limited sense. Since at least six non-muscorum neanurids in different tribes are reported to thrive on myxo slime, and we do not know if the thread creator's species will do well in a setup with just bark/yeast/algae or needs slime, I guess offering them slime probably can't hurt even if they turn out to be a slime-ignoring taxon (unless one of those weird understudied rare things happens, such as the slime attempting to eat the neanurids)...? I did not say that all neanurids required rearing on slimes. If I have not communicated so with sufficient clarity, I defer to you on the parts involving Holacanthella and neanurid yeast ingestion and was not attempting an attack either; in any case at this point I am operating well outside my domain of expertise and am too tired to go hunting for dietary analysis papers.


Anyways, several neanurids, including muscorum, are also reported to glow, interestingly: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjAEegQIBBAB&usg=AOvVaw3MSDsO3NauvP-Si6-LuvsY

 

[hecklad]

@coniontises @wizentrop
I'm fairly certain that what I have is a Morulina species, likely either callowayia or multatuberculata. I went out a few hours ago and collected some from the same spots, this time I payed closer attention to what they were near. I found four different clusters on separate logs and they were always near or on this white stuff; I'm not sure whether it's a slime or fungus


These are my two containers with them. The one on the left is from Saturday and the one on the right is from today.


In the older container, they have actually so far seemed to ignore the yeast and have mostly congregated on the moss.



On a separate note, I would love to have some bio-luminescent neanurids