Ahh, the little decomposers are the tiny or microscopic beings that we generally love to hate or love to eat! From beetles, termites and wasps to fungi and molds, decomposers are the world’s recycling and cleanup crew. They break down everything from fallen trees to large, dead animals that would block passages, allow the spread of disease, or lie there taking forever to go away.
Decomposers either provide nutrients, do mechanical processes, or bug the heck out of other life forms because of their destructive processes or chemical outputs.
Little decomposers clean up the water, scavenge the world and keep the place clean. Earthworms, larvae, bottom and algae eating fish, shrimps, and other life forms eat junk and poop one form of nutrient or another. Worms work the soil, keeping it from compacting so severely that plants cannot grow.
Some decomposers break down plant and biological material in ways that release the minerals and nutrients that other life forms need to thrive upon. As such, decomposers are part of the food chain.
Others have metabolic processes that produce enzymes and gases that can invade the air, soil or water to kill or sicken other life forms. Some produce allergic reactions or are poisonous. As such, they are direct or indirect predators or dangers to other life.
Others break down plant materials in ways that create humus, the very substance that keeps soil composition healthy and able to sustain plant life. If plant life can be sustained, desertification can be prevented. As such, decomposers are part of the weathering process.
Imagine a world that has no wasps, flies or beetles that eat decaying flesh, either as adults bite, dissolve or chew the flesh, or as the larvae get nutrition for their early stages of life. A dead animal would not decompose effectively or rapidly, leaving the smell of slowly rotting flesh that would last for an age. The dead animal would be a working factory for any disease causing bacteria and viruses, slowly releasing more and more disease into the soil and the water. Fungi and molds might get out of control, having far more time to bloom into problematic and possibly deadly volumes that could spread and feed on other things.
Leaves and dead plant material would build up for a while, suffocating new plants, then dessicate to become a fire hazard or to eventually blow away, leaving naked soil behind to deconstruct and break down until desertification results.
If the flesh eating flies, beetles and wasps had no molds or microbes to control their populations and to decompose their bodies, masses of dead insect carcasses would build up over the land, or animal populations that feast on insects might get out of control, feasting on the insect explosion and leaving the world with an overpopulation of those kinds of animals.
With no decomposers, higher life forms that feed on the broken down components of animal flesh and plant material would not get their nutrients and would thus not be able to make their contribution to the balance of life on the planet.
In summary, we suffer from having to put up with nature’s cleanup crew, but we also live because of nature’s cleanup crew: the decomposers of the food chain.
