As the Summer looms and picnics become more the vogue, have you ever considered how many bugs live beneath the grass where you’ve spread your picnic blanket?

If you’ve gone off to a city park for your picnic, you might expect the number of bugs to be fairly low.

WRONG!

Scientists investigating the diversity of the soil in Central Park in New York City took samples of soil every 50m across the 3.4km2 area. They used these soil samples to analyse the number and type of microbes living in the dirt, including bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes.

All together, they found 167,000 species! On average, each single soil sample had about 7000 bacteria and archaea, and 1250 eukaryote species.

Image credit: Ramirez et al. 2014.

Repost from the Stojdl Lab blog.