City Cemetery Is Alive With Shocking Number of Bats, Spiders
A huge new survey shows that a historic Jewish cemetery in Berlin is now a haven for hundreds of creatures normally found in the deep woods.
They went through the brick gates of the cemetery, sometimes at dark, passing by the graves of famous poets, painters, and scientists. Despite the wealth of historic headstones, these researchers had come to one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe not to visit the dead, but to hunt for life.
Ingo Kowarik, a professor of plant ecology at the Technical University of Berlin, led a team that recently conducted one of the first multi-taxonomic studies of an urban cemetery.
The researchers documented more than 600 species of plants and animals normally found in deep woods, including 64 species of spiders, 39 species of ground beetles, five kinds of bats, and some highly endangered ferns. Lichen in particular has really taken hold
