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When you think of cave animals, you may think of bats or bears but cave life is much more diversified. When I speak of cave animals, I am referring to various groups in the animal kingdom, including mammals, fish, insects and crustaceans.

Troglophiles

Many animals use cave entrances as shelters for sleeping, hibernation, safety and reproduction but are not true cave dwellers. The animals that only use the area of a cave near the entrance can be referred to as troglophiles.

These might be smaller mammals like:

Or larger mammals like bears, sheep, cattle, and even elephants in some African caves.

Insects include:

Reptiles such as salamanders, frogs and snakes can be found near cave entrances escaping the heat.

Birds such as swifts, swallows, owls and vultures sometimes use cave entrances for nesting.

Troglobites

An animal that only lives in caves and does not venture out is called a troglobiont or stygobiont for aquatic species but they are both usually referred to as troglobites.

True troglobites often have physical adaptations to cave life such as reduced or no vision, elongated appendages and loss of pigment (no color). For example:

Snails that live in caves often have thin white shells and smaller eyes.

Blind cave fish often have no eyes at all and no color.

The Kauai Cave Wolf Spider also has no eyes.

These adaptations most likely evolved over several million years.
Bats are not true troglobites because they only use caves for sleep and reproduction. Many people assume that they are blind because they use echolocation (sonar) to find their prey when they go out to feed but they actually can see.

Salamanders are common in the southern USA, especially Texas. The troglobiontic species are all lungless and breath with gills.

A very interesting animal, similar to a salamander and sometimes called a "white salamander" is Proteus anguinus or " Human Fish ".

Cave fish mostly live in cave streams and probably got there from surface streams that are swallowed by caves.

Crustaceans, including crabs, shrimp and crayfish are often the largest animals in a cave. But even then, the endangered Alabama cave shrimp is less than an inch long.

The smallest kind of cave animal is a microbe. One cave microbe is Epsilonproteobacteria. That's a big name for a tiny animal but it plays a big role. It actually plays a part in the formation of the cave itself by dissolving calcium carbonate. The gypsum that is left behind is easily dissolved by water. About 10% of the world's caves may be formed in this way.

Another microorganism that is more common and more easily seen in caves is a b acteria called actinomycete. Their colonies form fluorescent white dots on moist rock. They play a critical role in the processing and breakdown of organic matter.

It is estimated that there are around 50,000 different species of troglobites worldwide if all were accounted for but we will probably never discover them all. Still, new species are being discovered all the time.

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Cave Animals are More Than Bats and Bears

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When you think of cave animals, you may think of bats or bears but cave life is much more diversified. When I speak of cave animals, I am referring to various groups in the animal kingdom, including mammals, fish, insects and crustaceans.

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rocky and some water and tan colored places. open spaces

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The earliest cavers in Europe and North America were limited in their explorations by a lack of suitable equipment. Explorers of the early 1800s, when caving began to become more common, caved in tweed suits and used candles for illumination.

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rocky and light orange colored. Stalagmites and Stalactites.

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Anders, Mark "Backpack basics". Boys' Life.

Mark Anders describes the basics of backpacks. You need to get the right size of backpack and a backpack that will fit you and your needs. You should try on your backpack fist before buying it. Buying a backpack online isn't usually a good idea because it may not be right for you.

The source is useful because it explains good backpacks to use and what might be good for you. A bad backpack may ruin your whole trip. The source explains what do to if you run out of room or if you don't know what to do.

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Water filters use two different techniques to remove dirt. Physical filtration means straining water to remove larger impurities. ... Another method of filtering, chemical filtration, involves passing water  through an active material that removes impurities chemically as they pass through.

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August 9, 2018.

You can survive without food for several weeks, because your body will gradually switch to using stored fat and protein to make its energy. But cut off your water supply and you'll be dead within days. Water equals life: it's as simple as that. Around two thirds of your body (as much as 75 percent if you're a baby) is H2O. Even your bones, which you might think are completely solid, contain about 25 percent water. On average, we need 2.4 liters (0.6 gals) of water each day to keep ourselves healthy (though we don't have to drink anything like that much-we get a lot of our water from inside foods). With water so important to our lives, it's hardly surprising we like it clean, pure, and tasty. That's one reason people spend so much money on water filters that can remove any harmful impurities. How do they work-and do we really need them? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: An electric kettle with a built-in water filter. Photo courtesy of Lee J Haywood published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

How water filters work

Photo: Living filter: A classic wastewater filtering system outlined in a 1901 patent by Cleophas Monjeau of Middletown, Ohio. Dirty water drips down from the tank at the top (blue), passes through vegetation (probably a reed bed), which removes nutrients, organic matter, some kinds of pollution, and some bacteria, before dripping down through sand, charcoal, and gravel filters. The cleaner water is collected for reuse in another tank at the bottom. Reed beds are still widely used in purifying wastewater to this day, including in systems for cleaning up runoff from highways. Artwork from US Patent 681,884: Purifying water by Cleophas Monjeau, issued September 3, 1901, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Thanks largely to an unusual molecular structure, water is amazingly good at dissolving things. (We look at this in more detailed in our main article on water.) Sometimes that's helpful: if you want to bust the dust from your jeans, simply throw them in your washing machine with some detergent and the water and soap will pull the muck away like a magnet. But there's clearly a downside to this too. All of our water constantly circulates through the environment in what's known as the water cycle. One minute it's rushing through a river or drifting high in a cloud, the next it's streaming from your faucet (tap), sitting in a glass on your table, or flushing down your toilet. How do you know the water you're about to drink-with its brilliant ability to attract and dissolve dirt-hasn't picked up all kinds of nasties on its journey through Earth and atmosphere? If you want to be sure, you can run it through a water filter.

Water filters use two different techniques to remove dirt. Physical filtration means straining water to remove larger impurities. In other words, a physical filter is a glorified sieve-maybe a piece of thin gauze or a very fine textile membrane. (If you have an electric kettle, you probably have a filter like this built into the spout to remove particles of limescale.) Another method of filtering, chemical filtration, involves passing water through an active material that removes impurities chemically as they pass through.

Photo: Physical filtration: A NanoCeram Nanoalumina filter is a physical filter made from an alumina-based ceramic. It has nanoscale fibers- small enough to remove 99.99999 percent of viruses and bacteria from polluted water or air. Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy of US Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL).

Four types of water filters

There are four main types of filtration and they employ a mixture of physical and chemical techniques.

Activated carbon

Photo: A water treatment plant filters water for reuse by passing dirty water from homes and factories through beds of charcoal and sand. It's like a giant version of the filter in our artwork up above, though there's no reed bed in this system. Photo by Betsy J. Weiner courtesy of US Army.

The most common household water filters use what are known as activated carbon granules (sometimes called active carbon or AC) based on charcoal (a very porous form of carbon, made by burning something like wood in a reduced supply of oxygen). Charcoal is like a cross between the graphite "lead" in a pencil and a sponge. It has a huge internal surface area, packed with nooks and crannies, that attract and trap chemical impurities through a process called adsorption (where liquids or gases become trapped by solids or liquids). But while charcoal is great for removing many common impurities (including chlorine-based chemicals introduced during waste-water purification, some pesticides, and industrial solvents), it can't cope with "hardness" (limescale), heavy metals (unless a special type of activated carbon filter is used), sodium, nitrates, fluorine, or microbes. The main disadvantage of activated carbon is that the filters eventually clog up with impurities and have to be replaced. That means there's an ongoing (and sometimes considerable) cost.

Reverse osmosis

Reverse osmosis means forcing contaminated water through a membrane (effectively, a very fine filter) at pressure, so the water passes through but the contaminants remain behind.

A closer look at reverse osmosis

If you've studied biology, you've probably heard of osmosis. When you have a concentrated solution separated from a less concentrated solution by a semi-permeable membrane (a kind of filter through which some things can pass, but others can't), the solutions try to rearrange themselves so they're both at the same concentration.

Wait, it's simpler than it sounds!

Suppose you have a sealed glass bottle full of very sugary water and you stand it inside a big glass jug full of less sugary water. Nothing will happen. But what if the bottle is actually a special kind of porous plastic through which water (but not sugar) can travel? What happens is that water moves from the outer jug through the plastic (effectively, a semi-permeable membrane) into the bottle until the sugar concentrations are equal. The water moves all by itself under what's called osmotic pressure.

That's osmosis, so what about reverse osmosis? Suppose you take some contaminated water and force it through a membrane to make pure water. Effectively, you're making water go in the opposite direction to which osmosis would normally make it travel (not from a less-concentrated solution to a more-concentrated solution, as in osmosis, but from a more-concentrated solution to a less-concentrated solution).

Since you're making the water move against its natural inclination, reverse osmosis involves forcing contaminated water through a membrane under pressure-and that means you need to use energy. In other words, reverse-osmosis filters have to use electrically powered pumps that cost money to run. Like activated charcoal, reverse osmosis is good at removing some pollutants (salt, nitrates, or limescale), but less effective at removing others (bacteria, for example). Another drawback is that reverse osmosis systems produce quite a lot of waste-water-some waste four or five liters of water for every liter of clean water they produce.

Here's what a reverse osmosis filter unit looks like in practice, shown in cutaway. Unfiltered water (blue pipe) is pumped into a purification unit (gray) and passes through a plastic, semi-permeable membrane (yellow) made (in this case) of cellulose acetate. Clean water flows out through the red pipe; impurities flush away through the green pipe:

Artwork: A cutaway of a basic, reverse osmosis membrane filter. Artwork courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office from US Patent 3,390,773: Water purification system by Ulrich Merten. Gulf General Atomic Inc, July 2, 1968.

Ion exchange

Ion-exchange filters are particularly good at "softening" water (removing limescale). They're designed to split apart atoms of a contaminating substance to make ions (electrically charged atoms with too many or too few electrons). Then they trap those ions and release, instead, some different, less troublesome ions of their own-in other words, they exchange "bad" ions for "good" ones.

Artwork: How ion exchange works: Magnesium and calcium ions (orange and red) flow into the water filter crystals (gray), which initially contain sodium ions (yellow). The magnesium and calcium ions become trapped and the sodium ions are released in their place.

How do they work? Ion exchange filters are made from lots of zeolite beads containing sodium ions. Hard water contains magnesium and calcium compounds and, when you pour it into an ion-exchange filter, these compounds split apart to form magnesium and calcium ions. The filter beads find magnesium and calcium ions more attractive than sodium, so they trap the incoming magnesium and calcium ions and release their own sodium ions to replace them. Without the magnesium and calcium ions, the water tastes softer and (to many people) more pleasant. However, the sodium is simply a different form of contaminant, so you can't describe the end product of ion-exchange filtration as "pure water" (the added sodium can even be problematic for people on low-sodium diets). Another disadvantage of ion-exchange filtration is that you need to recharge the filters periodically with more sodium ions, typically by adding a special kind of salt. (This is why you have to add "salt" to dishwashers, from time to time: the salt recharges the dishwasher's water softener and helps to prevent a gradual build-up of limescale that can damage the machine.)

Distillation

One of the simplest ways to purify water is to boil it, but although the heat kills off many different bacteria, it doesn't remove chemicals, limescale, and other contaminants. Distillation goes a step further than ordinary boiling: you boil water to make steam, then capture the steam and condense (cool) it back into water in a separate container. Since water boils at a lower temperature than some of the contaminants it contains (such as toxic heavy metals), these remain behind as the steam separates away and boils off. Unfortunately, though, some contaminants (including volatile organic compounds or VOCs) boil at a lower temperature than water and that means they evaporate with the steam and aren't removed by the distillation process.

On balance

You can see that different types of filtration remove different pollutants-but there's no single technique that removes all the contaminants from water. That's why many home water-filter systems use two or more of these processes together. If you're looking for a home water filter, tread carefully. Bear in mind that you won't necessarily remove all the nasties. Remember, too, that most water filters require some kind of ongoing cost and, without regular maintenance to keep them working properly, can leave your water in worse shape than it was to begin with!

Should we stop drinking bottled water?

Many people buy water filters or bottled water in an often mistaken belief that tap water is dirty or harmful to drink. In fact, as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reveals, around 92 percent of US community water systems met "all applicable health-based drinking water standards" in 2018 (up from 85 percent in 2005). In England and Wales, for the year 2017, the Drinking Water Inspectorate reported that 99.96 percent of drinking water met national and European standards (involving some 40 different quality measurements). Those figures are pretty remarkable really, when you consider just how dirty we make water and some of the things (like pesticides and car oil) that people flush down their drains. Even so, the high quality of most drinking water doesn't stop people spending something like$280 billion, worldwide, each year, buying bottled water that's several thousand times more expensive than tap water.

Cost isn't the only drawback of bottled water. Most of it comes in disposable plastic bottles that are hard to recycle. Dumped in landfills, washed away in rivers, dropped on beaches, burned in incinerators-plastic bottles add to the pollution that's reducing the quality of Earth's natural water supply. How ironic: by buying "clean" bottled water to keep ourselves healthy, we're helping to make Earth a dirty place and making things worse overall.

Why not break the habit of buying bottled water? You can reuse certain types of disposable plastic bottles, providing you wash them out thoroughly and air dry them, but it's safer to buy yourself a hygienic reusable plastic or aluminum water bottle and fill that from the tap instead. Do that as few as 10-20 times and your bottle will soon pay for itself.

Best of all, give the money you save on bottled water to WaterAid and help some of the people who genuinely lack clean water in developing countries. Let's count ourselves lucky we don't have to drink water straight from a dirty river, like many people still do. As an interesting aside, remember that we spend $280 billion a year on bottled water? Let's put that in context. One of the UN's Millennium Development Goals was to "halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation"; in 2012, the World Bank estimated that the annual cost of achieving that would be $184 billion.

Find out more

London Mayor Seeks Revival of Public Drinking Fountains by Alan Cowell, Guardian, 4 December 2017. Providing more public water points is one way to solve the bottled water problem.

Should I stop drinking bottled water? by Luisa Dillner, The Guardian, 1 June 2015. Why tap water may be better for you than bottled.

Selling Bottled Water That's Better for the Planet by Gloria Dawson. The New York Times, April 30, 2016. The story of Just Water, which aims to provide a better alternative to bottled water.

The Story of Bottled Water: The Guardian, 14 December 2010. A couple of great videos here that explain the real cost of bottled water.

Bottled water: who needs it? by Tom Heap, BBC Panorama, 18 February 2008. Examines the case against bottled water asking questions such as this: is it morally acceptable to import bottled water from Fiji where one third of the population lack clean, safe drinking water?

Find out more

On this website

On other sites

Books and articles

Patents

For more details about how water filters are constructed in practice, try these references. I've picked one typical example of each of the main types of filter; you can find many more examples by searching Google Patents or the USPTO website.

US Patent 3,390,773: Water purification system by Ulrich Merten. Gulf General Atomic Inc, July 2, 1968. Describes a typical reverse-osmosis filter system.

US Patent US,7537,695 B2: Water filter incorporating activated carbon particles with surface-grown carbon nanofilaments by Michael Donovan Mitchell et al, Pur Water Purification Products, Inc., May 26, 2009. A state-of-the-art activated-carbon and carbon nanofilament water filter.

US Patent 4,474,620: Apparatus for purification of water by ion exchange by James W. Hall. October 2, 1984. A typical ion-exchange filter using gravity and a manometer pressure effect.

US 20040003990 A1: Water purification apparatus and method for purifying water by Pierre Mansur, January 8, 2004. A recent patent for producing "pure" distilled water from tap water using both distillation and carbon filtration.

More to explore on our website...

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How do water filters work? | Types of water filter

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August 9, 2018. You can survive without food for several weeks, because your body will gradually switch to using stored fat and protein to make its energy. But cut off your water supply and you'll be dead within days. Water equals life: it's as simple as that.

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Packs, Bags & Cases - Caving Packs & Bags - Karst Sports

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https://www.switchbacktravel.com/best-headlamps

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The Cav Pak was developed specifically for tracking all the places you go through in the cave. It will map it whenever you walk into a new place in the cave. Eventually you will have a good map of all the cave that you explored. This way you won't get lost or have to retrace your steps. Every few seconds or minute your backpack will scan the whole area of cave that you are currently in. On your small device you will have a 3D image of the cave parts you have explored. The scanner is not heavy or bulky, it is just a small chip on the back of your backpack that scans every minute or so. The backpack is durable and works well and lasts long. It is comfortable and fits your needs. It's very sturdy and doesn't break very easily. The straps are very strong. Very well fitting and fits you and your needs.

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vocab words for spelunking: Endurance, Oolites, Zealous, Stalactite, Stalagmites, Claustrophobia.

There are many Stalactites and Stalagmites in caves. You may find oolites, too. Caves are very closed and you might feel claustrophobia. You have to endure all the things you find in the caves. You will be zealous about a lot of things you may
discover.