The Ayyalon Cave (Hebrew: מערת איילון‎‎) is a large underground limestone cave near Ramla, Israel in which new species of crustaceans were discovered in April 2006. What makes the cave extremely interesting to science are two elements. One is that its complex food web survived for millions of years without light or organic food coming in from the surface, being based solely on a type of bacterium which feeds on sulfur and is the only organic matter available for the next higher level of organisms to feed on. The other is the fact that the cave has offered an ecological refuge for species whose relatives living at the surface have been wiped out by climatic changes and catastrophic events over millions of years, so that it now offers a unique sample for the study of long-term ecological cha