About Springtail Wiki
A free reference for springtails (Collembola), built so that you can check every statement.
Springtail Wiki is a reference for people who keep springtails and for people who study them. It covers the species kept in the hobby, the names sellers use for them, how to keep them, and how to tell them apart.
The aim is simple. When the site says something, you can see where it comes from and how much weight to give it.
- 47 species
- 709 sourced statements
- 53 sources
- 53 hobby cultures
What you will find
Species
A drawing, key characters, husbandry and naming history for each species.
Trade names
What a name on a label can mean, with the species it most likely is.
Hobby cultures
The cultures people keep, listed apart from the species they are thought to be.
Guides
Step by step methods for starting, feeding and renewing a culture.
Troubleshooting
Start from what you see and get a likely cause and what to do.
Glossary
Plain definitions that open where you read.
Identification key
Narrow down a springtail with the equipment you have.
How it is different
- Every statement has at least one source and an evidence level. What the levels mean.
- A hobby name is never treated as a species. It gets its own page and a ranked list of candidates.
- Where nobody knows, the page says so and links an open question.
- The pictures are drawings, not photographs. A drawing can show the features that matter and can be drawn to scale. It never implies that a photo with no expert identification shows a particular species. Each species page links to iNaturalist for real photographs.
- The site does not use AI when you read it. Search, identification and the simulator are ordinary code, and the method page explains their rules.
- There are no tracking cookies and no advertising. What the site keeps.
What it is not
- It is not a substitute for a specialist. Most springtails cannot be named to species from a photo or with a hand lens. When that is the honest answer, the key says so.
- It is not a shop. It sells nothing and has no paid placements.
- It is not a forum. Corrections and sources go through a review queue, not a comment thread.
Who runs it
Springtail Wiki is an independent project. The code is open source under the MIT licence. The data and the text are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, so you can reuse them if you credit the site.
You can get the data from the open data page. If you spot a mistake or know a source we missed, tell us.