Jeff knows that the dust is made of dry skin, toenail detritus, dandruff, and gunk from the corners of eyes.
The parasitic worm spends its childhood growing in the belly of a pill bug, a small terrestrial crustacean that feeds on detritus and dry leaves and, occasionally, worm eggs scattered therein.
Edible parts of each individual plant variety (Table 1) were rinsed with sterile distilled water to remove detritus and dried in hot air oven at 50°C for 7 days.
On Wednesday, Pakistan's army made a point of letting scores of television crews trample over the crime scene in order that they could broadcast pictures of rooms blasted by suicide bombers, floors covered with pools of barely dried blood, and the sad detritus of an ordinary school day suddenly interrupted by seven terrorists.
Density (ind.100 g DM−1) was calculated from the total abundance of Chironomidae in the remaining ash-free dry mass of E. azurea leaf detritus from each of the seven sampling periods.
A review of my own closet — after clearing away the detritus of 100 plastic dry-cleaning bags — suggests I may be one of the least green people on the planet, perhaps personally responsible for the dust cloud looming over China as a result of over-grazing of Mongolian goats.
Low desiccation resistance and a primarily algal detritus diet constrain them to the dry and splash zones of the upper rocky intertidal; where they can take up water from droplets and puddles by capillarity and from water vapor directly from the air, and hide under rocks and in crevices to minimize water loss and hide from predators [12].
For the past two years water has flowed in plenty; torrents have surged down riverbeds that had been dry for years, flushing out accumulations of salt and detritus.
The result looks like a strange cross between a natural disaster and a contemporary art installation, with cement, now dry, two-thirds of the way up the walls, the detritus of everyday life poking out of the surface.
Taken together, our results strongly support contemporaneous lacustrine detritus, blown from the lake shore, as an important driver of soil respiration in the Antarctic dry valley soils.
