Large small soil arthropods since millions of years in our healthy soils

This little mite you see is an oribatid, this group of mites was already functionally diverse in the earliest soils of Earth’s history, these mites have been evolving within the soil system since 400 million years ago. Today, oribatid mites play a central role in the architecture of the soil food web. Often, these mites are collectively and functionally described as generalist-opportunists that utilise resources from fungi to algae to decaying plant material. However, stable isotope studies of oribatid mites clearly show that they cover a wide range of trophic levels, actually comprising all trophic strategies in the soil food web, from detritivores at the bottom to predators and scavengers at the top of the food web.

Orybatid mites filled all the trophic niches within the available soil compartments already found in Devonian and Carboniferous soils, thus building fully functional food webs that could already aid the nutrient cycling and energy flows that constitute the soil-soil links today. The future challenge is to reveal the evolutionary complexity of subterranean food webs and how this co-evolved with the aerial component of terrestrial food webs.