When I do public relations articles I prioritize having a very clear story (who discovered what?). This time, however, I put on a journalist's hat and wrote about several discoveries in the field of speleology as they were revealed by the smallest creatures in the dark: viruses, bacteria, insects.
The result is the text "A beetle has disappeared from Bear Cave", published in Mindcraft Stories.
Speleologist Oana Moldovan crouches in the Bear Cave, shining a torch on the ground. It can be morning, noon, or evening. No matter what time of day it is, the cave is equally dark, damp (95%) and cold (8-10 degrees Celsius). It can be a random year or season, because Oana Moldovan has been studying the cave for over 20 years and returns to it frequently. And she never leaves the cave before she huddles up looking for the same thing, always: a beetle.
The story of her search begins in 1997. Accompanied by two colleagues, Oana Moldovan, freshly graduated from the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, was placing slices of salami on top of clay pots on the ground in three different places in the Cave of the Bears. This is how the team trapped each beetle that came to feed and counted how many there were in total. The researchers then compared the insect numbers with older ones, catalogued 20 years before the cave in the Apuseni Mountains, Bihor County, became one of Romania's most popular caving attractions. In 1977, two types of insects were found in the cave: a new species of the genus Drimeotus and one from the genus Pholeuon.
But by 1997, two decades after the cave had become a tourist attraction, things had changed dramatically. Researchers noticed that during the summer, when the cave was full of tourists, the insects moved their home away from the human path. It was not until winter, when the tourists disappeared, that they became masters of the cave again. The observation was especially true for insects of the genus Drimeotus. For Pholeuon, the number of insects observed decreased from four (in the 1970s) to one (in the late 1990s), after which they were not seen at all.
In November 2019, Oana Moldovan returned once again to the cold and darkness of the Bear Cave, again inventorying the fauna of the place and looking for at least one specimen of the Pholeuon leptoderum. She hadn't seen one for some time.
"And what difference does it make that it's gone?" I ask her.
"Absolutely none. Big deal, a beetle disappeared. People aren't affected in any way and don't care," she laughs, with her laughter carrying the opposite meaning.
You can read the article here (in Romanian).
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