During a two year population ecology study in a cave environment, 15 Eurycea (= Typhlotriton) spelaea were observed ingesting bat guano. Furthermore, E. spelaea capture numbers increased significantly during the time that grey bats (Myotis grisescens) deposited fresh guano. We investigated the hypothesis that this behaviour was not incidental to the capture of invertebrate prey, but a diet swit...

The current study describes the extracellular hydrolytic activities of halophilic bacteria isolated from subterranean rock salt. The estimated number of grown colonies was approximately 3000 per gram of a rock salt on the surface of the medium MH containing 10% NaCl. The investigated strains, randomly selected from the colonies observed on the plate, showed at least one of the tested extracellu...

Many subterranean mammals are reported to generate or respond to seismic vibrations. Potential uses of seismic sensitivity in these animals include intraspecific communication between burrow systems, location of prey, detection of predators and even “seismic echolocation” of distant obstacles. Although the auditory and/or somatosensory systems have been variously implicated, the mechanisms used...

The exchange of groundwater between land and sea is a major component of the hydrological cycle. This exchange, called submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), is comprised of terrestrial water mixed with sea water that has infiltrated coastal aquifers. The composition of SGD differs from that predicted by simple mixing because biogeochemical reactions in the aquifer modify its chemistry. To emph...

Subterranean environments, even though they do not possess a primary production (photosynthesis), may present high biodiversity, faunistic originality, endemism, phylogenetic isolations and unique ecological and/or evolution events, in addition to rare taxa. Studies investigating the biological diversity in Neotropical caves are relatively rare and recent, and most of them have been conducted i...

The Asian subterranean termite, Coptotermes gestroi, is a tropical species but has increasingly been collected from the subtropics in recent years, making it sympatric to the Formosan subterranean termite, C. formosanus in at least three areas, Taiwan, Hawaii, and Florida. Simultaneous flights by these two species were observed since 2013 in South Florida, during which interspecies tandems were...

Various concentrations (100, 500, 1000, 5000 and 10000 ppm) of boric acid were tested in laboratory to check its potential as a slow-acting toxicant against subterranean termite, Heterotermes indicola (Rhinotermitidae: Isoptera). Under the tested concentrations, ELT 50 (Effective Lethal Dose to kill 50% of the exposed termites) values ranged from 2.7 to 5.4 days while ELT 90 were 4.5 and 9.1 da...

New locations of Coletinia maggii (Grassi, 1887) have been discovered in the center of the Iberian Peninsula in different types of subterranean environments, such as a stony layer in the subsoil of an alluvial plain, an alluvial Mesovoid Shallow Substratum or Milieu Souterrain Superficiel (MSS) and a gypsum cave. This is the first record of both an alluvial MSS in the center of the Iberian Peni...

The freshwater crustaceans from the order Amphipoda occur mainly in cold and temperate climates. However, in the tropics, these animals can be more abundant in subterranean environments, where the temperatures are milder than in surface. Despite being accepted that the number of species of freshwater amphipods in South America is lower when compared to other regions, recent descriptions have sh...