Buggery

george

Member
So I found this in a local cave. It looks like these guys have crawled over some gour pools and expired - leaving their bodies to be calcified.
So can anyone shed some more light on them? Are they Rove Beetles? Do they metamorphose, leaving a shell behind to fossilise? Or do they just sit there and let it happen? And I am quite interested in the timescale as well - it must be a relatively quick process to capture the bodies like that...

I have a few more photos from different angles if anyone shows any interest...

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adam

Member
I wonder if they might be pseudoscorpions? I can't see from the picture if they have claws or not. What size were they?

They remind me of the shucks left on rocks by stoneflies when they metamorphose, but they could just as easily be whole bodies.

 

2xw

Active member
I think they're some sort of nymph like a flattened mayfly or a stonefly, you can see at the top of one the V shape where the fly has emerged from its case. These are the moulted shells where the larvae ascends from the water and turns into a fly. Cool feature
 

george

Member
The biggest ones are around 2.5cm long.
Larvae ascending from the water sounds like a good theory; they also look like some kind of 'Evolution' picture - getting less calcified the further up they go!
 

2xw

Active member
I'll stick me neck out then - these are stonefly larvae shells, left after the insects turns into a fly. I'm basing that on the flattened legs and two Cerci visible. It is covered in calcite so could be a mayfly as well :)
 

JohnS

New member
I understand that fossilisation of a body is the replacement of the biological structure with calcium. Is that what is happening here?
 

Kenilworth

New member
JohnS said:
I understand that fossilisation of a body is the replacement of the biological structure with calcium. Is that what is happening here?
No. At least not yet. Organic debris can be overlain with calcite much more quickly than the rate of decomposition, which is often very slow within a cave ecosystem. That appears to be happening in this case.

These photos are nice, but is there any chance that someone can take more, including some with scale, for documentation purposes? I reckon this is a relatively rare thing and might not last very long.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
We found this 'frozen' insect in Odin Mine a few years ago. It was a bugger to focus on in the constricted passage, I'll say that - best I could do. It appears to have just expired where it landed and gradually got coated, but I'm not sure of the process if it's not in direct contact with water. It looks more like moonmilk to me, but there wasn't any as white on the surrounding walls. Perhaps the bacteria on the fly helped 'colonisation' - dunno much about this stuff. For a tiny object like this, I wonder whether it would be easier or more difficult to guess a date? Given where it was (prob. 17th C passage), but also the fact that the mine was still active until the mid-19th C, probably not that long.

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Kenilworth

New member
Pwhole,
That looks more fungal than mineral. I've seen many dead bats, raccoons, and insects covered in similar white fungus. Perhaps the photo is deceiving me though.

Even if it is calcite (deposited as moonmilk (which may or may not have a biological component, there is no consensus) or otherwise, it is almost certainly younger than 19th century. Calcification can happen quickly, as it must if it is to coat such delicate and perishable material. In the right conditions, weeks are enough. On my old computer I have photos of calcite on green oak leaves.
 

george

Member
I like the responses to this and I'm glad others are interested as well. "Calcite on green oak leaves" sounds pretty cool!

I popped in earlier and got a couple more pictures 'for scale'. I don't know anything about how you go about documenting these things but here's the first 2.

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george

Member
These next 2 are from further back to give a bit of perspective. Both with 30cm ruler.

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On this second one the bugs are up and left of the ruler - sorry for crap photo.
 

george

Member
Like I said, I don't know about measuring or recording things for "documentation purposes". So as well as the old "holding a ruler nearby" method, I employed some others to cover all bases.

This is the Brown-Whillans method -

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I'm sure all the scientists out there are familiar with the Brown-Whillans method of clasification, but just for clarity this is a standard No. 1 DMM wallnut.
 

george

Member
And this is the continental standard 'Matchbox' method -

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And again for the layman out there, this is a Peugeot 207 rally edition. Obviously.
 

Kenilworth

New member
I sadly cannot access any of the stuff on my computer at this time, some day I'll get an expert to try and retrieve some things. I have photos of quite a few calcified things. Around 3 minutes into this video are some calcified leaf litter and roots, etc. I wasn't focusing on this (or much of anything videographically, as it turns out) instead trying to identify the morphology of the little gours, but you can sort of see some of the floor debris.
https://youtu.be/ZVkzXhRbdw0

It is frustrating to hear guides and cavers cite definitive timetables for calcite deposition when the variance seems to be extreme.
 
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