Cave Life
What lives in permanent darkness. Bats and their colonies, blind fish and cave salamanders, troglobites that lost their eyes and pigment, extremophiles in deep rock, and the microbiology of places sunlight never reaches.
Part of Underground
32 moments in this segment.
- - Nz glowworm. Glowworm (Arachnocampa luminosa) in a cave in New Zealand.
- - Bat white-nose syndrome: a new fungus among us. USGS lecture by Dr David Blehert on the disease first found in a New York cave in 2007, which by 2012 had killed more than five million hibernating bats.
- - The Waitomo caves. Science explainer on the New Zealand cave system where glowworms emit a blue-green light across the roof.
- - The Bats That Survived a Killer Fungus. By 2015 white-nose syndrome had spread to 26 US states and five Canadian provinces; researchers examine the hibernating colonies that came through it.
- - Weird Places: Movile Cave. In 1986 a Romanian prospecting crew for a geothermal plant accidentally broke into a cave sealed for millennia, whose ecosystem runs on chemosynthesis rather than sunlight.
- - What Blind Cavefish Reveal About Evolution. Ichthyologist Prosanta Chakrabarty on hunting new cave-fish species and what their loss of eyes tells us about how evolution works.
- - The glowworm caves of New Zealand in 360 degrees. National Geographic films the carnivorous larvae whose bioluminescence lights the ceilings of the Waitomo caves.
- - Survivor: bats against white-nose syndrome. US Fish and Wildlife Service on the small numbers of little brown bats in the Northeast that have survived several winters of exposure to the fungus.
- - Troglobites: Strange Cave Specialists. Planet Earth on cave systems as islands, and the blind salamanders and other troglobites that evolve in that isolation.
- - Fighting White-Nose Syndrome in Mammoth Cave. Researchers at Mammoth Cave National Park work on the disease threatening the bats that underpin the cave ecosystem.
- - Winifred Frick on White-Nose Syndrome. A bat ecologist explains the fungal disease that began killing hibernating little brown bats in the northeastern US in 2006.
- - Six Animals Extraordinarily Adapted to Cave Life. A survey of troglomorphy: the traits cave animals gain and, more often, lose in permanent darkness.
- - The Strange Lives of Olm Salamanders. The pale, gilled olms of the caves beneath Predjama Castle in Slovenia, the 'human fish' that live their whole lives underground.
- - The Ecology and Behavior of Bats. Rachel Page of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Bat Lab on how bats live, hunt and roost.
- - What Are Extremophiles?. The Microbiology Society on organisms living at temperature, pressure and chemical extremes, including deep subsurface and vent habitats.
- - The baby olms of Postojna Cave. Postojna Cave in Slovenia presents three of the twenty-one olms (Proteus anguinus) hatched in its aquarium, the blind amphibians long known locally as baby dragons.
- - Troglofauna: Animals of the Caves. A survey of the obscure animals science knows from lightless cave environments.
- - Microorganisms in the Deep Biosphere. A European Astrobiology Institute seminar on deep-biosphere microbes and what they imply for the search for life elsewhere.
- - Life in Lechuguilla. The microbial life of Lechuguilla Cave, presented at the symposium marking the cave passing 150 miles of surveyed passage in October 2019.
- - Inside Bracken Bat Cave. Researchers run electrical resistivity surveys inside Bracken Cave, home to the world's largest bat colony, to find the deepest guano deposits.
- - Adapted to the Dark: The World of Cave Crickets. A documentary on the wingless cave crickets of the Naracoorte caves in South Australia and their role in the underground food web.
- - Rapid Evolution in Cave Populations of the Mexican Tetra. A researcher on Astyanax mexicanus, the surface fish whose cave populations lose eyes and pigment, and on the earliest chapters of that change.
- - White-nose syndrome in bats: the westward march. Dr Cori Lausen on the fungal disease spreading through North American bat hibernacula and what it means for cave access and conservation.
- - Microbial Life in the Terrestrial Subsurface. A Penn State seminar on the microorganisms that live in rock kilometres below the land surface and what they mean for astrobiology.
- - How glowworms fish with bioluminescent lines. Waitomo glowworms lower sticky luminous strands from the cave ceiling to trap flying insects drawn to the light.
- - Why Lechuguilla Cave is completely off-limits. Lechuguilla is closed to all but permitted research trips to protect its rare formations and the extremophile microbes that live on them.
- - The battle against white-nose syndrome. The fungus has killed nine in ten little brown, northern long-eared and tricoloured bats across the United States and Canada, forcing cave closures.
- - There Is Life Hiding Inside Earth. Kurzgesagt on the deep biosphere: the vast microbial population living kilometres down in rock, and how much of Earth's biomass it represents.
- - Intraterrestrials: Hunting Life Beneath the Surface. Microbiologist Karen Lloyd introduces her firsthand account of searching for the microbes that live inside the Earth's crust.
- - Life in darkness: how life survives without sunlight. Documentary on sulphurous, lightless cave ecosystems including Movile Cave in Romania, sealed off for millions of years.
- - Building Resilience in Alberta's Bats Against White-Nose Syndrome. A 2026 science seminar on white-nose syndrome, which reached Alberta in 2024 after killing millions of North American bats.
- - Life Without Sunlight: The Creatures of Movile Cave. A tour of Movile Cave in Romania, sealed from the surface for millions of years, whose animals depend on chemosynthetic bacteria rather than the sun.