"Dig a few handfuls of sediment from the bottom and the river's significance begins to reveal itself. Half of what you hold in your hands is sand and gravel, and the rest is live species - mussels, snails, juvenile crayfish, the larvae of stoneflies and dragonflies. It seems possible that the driving force of planetary life is actually very small and that its intricacies are lost on most of us," author Alan Huffman remarks in an essay accompanying the pictures.
An unknown world was found when the cube was suspended from the branch of a tree in Costa Rica's rainforest. This time, 145 species - birds, mammals, mosses, bromeliads and epiphytes - were recorded.
"This is the last biotic frontier, the missing pieces of the phenomenal jigsaw puzzle that is the tropical rainforest. How forest canopy populations become established, grow and disperse to other sites remains wholly unknown," said canopy researcher Nalini Nadkarni.
The cubic foot was dropped on Temae coral reef near Tahiti in the Pacific.
There, 600 individual animals and plants more than a millimetre in size - some living permanently in the space, others swimming or floating through - were recorded.
"And this is not counting the many thousands of smaller creatures that floated by each hour. Wrasses, sea slugs, a baby octopus, shrimp, worms and crabs as small as the letters on the page were all recorded," reported author Elizabeth Kolbert.
Jasper Slingsby, a researcher at the South Africa environmental observational network, recorded life in a cubic foot of Table Mountain National Park in South Africa. In the course of 24 hours, the sample revealed almost 30 plant species and roughly 70 invertebrates.
By moving the cube, as much as a 50 per cent difference in plant species was recorded.
"There are multitudes of species many orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest mite we found.
"Indeed, it would take more than a lifetime simply to document the diversity of life in one cubic foot here. Even one cubic inch is a world worth contemplating," Slingsby wrote.
Science is only slowly catching up with biodiversity, partly thanks to the great United States biologist E.O. Wilson, who, apart from studying ants, has best communicated the interlocking mechanisms of life.
"When you thrust a shovel into the soil or tear off a piece of coral, you are, godlike, cutting through an entire world. You have crossed a hidden frontier known to very few," he says in a foreword.
"Immediately close at hand, around and beneath our feet, lies the least explored part of the planet's surface. It is also the most vital place on earth for human existence.
"In any habitat, on the ground, in the forest canopy, or in the water, your eye is first caught by the big animals - birds, mammals, fish, butterflies.
"But gradually the smaller inhabitants, far more numerous, begin to eclipse them.
"There are the insect myriads creeping and buzzing among the weeds, the worms and unnameable creatures that squirm or scuttle for cover when you turn garden soil for planting."
Among the photographic celebration of life's abundance and complexity lies the tragedy. Liittschwager's pictures record the beauty, weirdness, elegance and sheer extraordinariness of life, but, as nearly every commentator in the book notes, these habitats are fast disappearing in what is becoming known as the sixth great extinction.
The testaments of the experts are terrifying.
"Even as I make my measurements of the abundance of canopy life in the protected forests of Costa Rica, I can hear chainsaws," writes Nadkarni.
"From Cameroon to Costa Rica logging, development, climate change and changes in agricultural land use have led to the disappearance and fragmentation of rainforests at an alarming pace.
"We canopy researchers hang from our arboreal perches, [but] we can see clear cuts just beyond."
Says Kolbert: "If nothing is done to reduce [climate change] emissions, many scientists believe that, by mid-century, reefs worldwide will no longer be able to sustain themselves and will slowly disappear. With them will go the wealth of life they support.
"As the creatures from just this one cubic foot attest, the losses up and down the food chain would be staggering."
Earth, says Wilson, is the only planet we know that has a biosphere.
"It alone is able to maintain the exact environment we ourselves need to stay alive.
"If all the organisms were to disappear from any one of the cubic spaces depicted, the environment in it would shift to a radical new state.
"The molecules of the soil or streambed would become smaller and simpler. The ratios of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases in the air would change. A new equilibrium would be approached, at which the cubic foot would resemble that on some distant sterile planet."
A small world, says Liittschwager, awaits exploration.
"In time, we will come fully to appreciate the magnificent little ecosystems that have fallen under our stewardship." Unless, of course, we leave it too late.
- Observer
