Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep little springtail

Someone recently gave me a tip - the Sparklets Corkmaster. These gizmos are no longer manufactured but they were intended to remove corks from wine bottles using CO2 from the standard 8g bulbs.



They can be picked up cheaply on sites such as eBay and are by far the most convenient devices I have ever found for insect anesthesia. Having said which, I could find nothing in the literature about using CO2 to immobilize springtails, and given that soil arthropods might be expected to be resistant to lower O2 levels, I was a bit doubtful, so I gave it a try. And it worked quite well - poot the springtail into a small pot, give them a squirt of CO2 from the Corkmaster, wait for them to have a snooze and then you have some time to take nice in vivo photos before they are fully awake and mobile again. Exactly how long seems to depend on the species. Tomocerus minor seemed to wake relatively quickly, but there was still time to take high magnification images: