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Robert Krulwich has an amazing story over at NPR:

We'll start in a cornfield -- we'll call it an Iowa cornfield in late summer -- on a beautiful day. The corn is high. The air is shimmering. There's just one thing missing -- and it's a big thing...

...a very big thing, but I won't tell you what, not yet.

He then takes us on a trip around the world:

I'm going to leap halfway around the world to a public park near Cape Town, South Africa, where you will notice a cube, a metal cube, lying there in the grass.

That cube was put there by David Liittschwager, a portrait photographer, who spent a few years traveling the world, dropping one-cubic-foot metal frames into gardens, streams, parks, forests, oceans, and then photographing whatever, or whoever came through. Beetles, crickets, fish, spiders, worms, birds -- anything big enough to be seen by the naked eye he tried to capture and photograph. Here's what he found after 24 hours in his Cape Town cube:

There were 30 different plants in that one square foot of grass, and roughly 70 different insects. And the coolest part, said a researcher to the Guardian in Britain, "If we picked the cube up and walked 10 feet, we could get as much as 50 percent difference in plant species we encountered. If we moved it uphill, we might find none of the species." Populations changed drastically only a few feet away -- and that's not counting the fungi, microbes, and the itsy-bitsies that Liittschwager and his team couldn't see.

But you must finish reading Krulwich's piece to see how it ends between the rows and rows of corn in Middle America.

It ain't pretty.

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