By Jill Riddell
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The exhibit begins with the pretense that you’re about to be shrunk to the size of a bug. As you walk through the corridor of the “shrink chamber,” the tiles on the floor grow larger while a mirror makes you appear smaller. By the time you walk into the simulated-soil-environment portion of the exhibit, you are one-hundredth your normal size. The roof, walls, and floor are made of brown lumps, and snaking throughout them are replicas of white roots and fungi. Some of the roots are as thick as a linebacker’s thigh, others are mere threads. There’s a bur oak acorn the size of half a Volkswagen, a prairie crayfish as thick as a tree trunk, a mole cricket the size of a small couch.
Exhibit designers have played up the horror-movie aspect, with a giant earwig that lurches forward to defend her eggs and a wolf spider that devours a beetle grub “as big as your head!” according to the promotional materials. The exhibit uses the animatronics that have become familiar to Chicago museumgoers since the “DinoRama!” exhibit at the Chicago Academy of Sciences in the 1980s.
Aside from its purely utilitarian value, soil is a subject ripe for study, for it’s incredibly complex and biologically rich and it tells us a lot about the nature of life. And there are many more species and individual organisms under the ground than above it. When we think of preserving or restoring ecosystems almost all of our attention is paid to what we can easily see, yet what goes on out of sight has been so little studied that an estimated 30 to 40 percent of soil organisms are unknown to science.
