Discoveries in the Dark

" Cave creatures live buried alive. Troglobites—the technical name for these millipedes, spiders, worms, blind salamanders, and eyeless fish—are made to navigate, mate, and kill amid perpetual darkness, desperate starvation, poison gases, and endless labyrinths of stone. Evolved in isolation and unable to disperse, species often consist of just a handful of individuals in one cave, or one room of one cave. Their existence raises many questions. How did they get there, and when? How do they survive—and how much longer can they hang on? Increasingly, many are threatened by pollution, quarrying, and vandalism. Ultimately, they are connected to a surface ever more populated, and penetrated, by us. They are the wildest canaries in the coal mine.Worldwide, perhaps 90 percent of caves lack visible entrances and remain undiscovered. Even in well-explored caves, troglobites are expert at hiding. The roughly 7,700 species known are probably only a small taste of what lives below. "


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This month on: National Geographic