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Ecologist Dr. Bruce Snyder and biology major Christina Cortes rummage through leaves for millipedes at Lake Laurel.
Millipedes are thought to be the earth’s first animal to leave water and breathe on land. Now a Georgia College professor is using the under-studied arthropod to see if the world’s changing environment affects this fascinating multi-legged cousin to bugs.
The answer could act as a sign that Georgia forests are losing millipedes and, thus, their No. 1 soldier in ‘waste management.’
Like earthworms – millipedes are responsible for breaking leafy matter into nutritious, healthy soil for trees and plants. They speed up decomposition in forests. Without them, there’s soil erosion and less moisture retention.
There has been little study on millipedes in Georgia.
“Our natural ecosystems do so much for us. They filter air. They filter water. They provide us with timbers and fuels and sometimes food,” said Ecologist Dr. Bruce Snyder, one of only a handful of scientists in the world studying the ecology of this creeping-burrowing creature.
“The more we change the environment, the more those eco-functions are going to change,” he said. “If the millipedes are affected or an invasive species comes in from Asia or Europe – that can change the entire ecosystem. We can have a whole shift in tree composition.”
Documenting various types of millipedes is an important part of Snyder’s work. Unlike other places in the U.S. and southeast – Georgia’s a “black hole.” There’s little information on diversity of millipedes in its forests.
Snyder and ecology students often rummage through leaves in the forest surrounding Lake Laurel in Milledgeville. They risk chiggers, ticks and poison ivy to find the elusive multi-segmented arthropod, which is found under rocks, mounds of leaves and decaying logs.
Georgia is home to about a hundred different millipedes, compared to 12,000 worldwide. They range from a couple of …
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