CoachThe decomposers are the living things that feed on dead organic matter — fallen leaves, dead wood, droppings, corpses:
- the visible crew: earthworms, woodlice, millipedes, springtails, fly larvae, dung beetles;
- the fungi: molds and mushrooms, whose feeding body is a felt of white threads spread through soil and dead wood — the mushroom of Exercise 1.10 is only its fruit;
- and, finishing every job, soil life too small to see — the final dismantlers.
They are Definition 34.3’s shadow-workers, promised their own chapter: this is it.
Examples
Example 42.2 (A handful, censused)
One handful of woodland soil, sorted on a white tray: mineral grains; root threads; half-leaves, leaf skeletons and black crumbs — organic matter on its way down; and the census — an earthworm, two woodlice, a millipede, tiny white springtails, thread-fine fungus felts. And the tray shows only the visible: a single gram of soil holds more living things too small to see than there are people in a great city.
Example 42.5 (The leaf’s last year)
Follow one oak leaf down. November: fallen, whole. Winter: softened, mined by fungi’s threads, nibbled to a lace skeleton by springtails and woodlice. Spring: dragged underground by an earthworm, eaten, and cast out as worm-worked crumbs. Summer: its last fragments are black humus, and its minerals ride the soil’s water — into a root, perhaps the oak’s own. Eaten four times, the leaf has become food for its own tree.
Example 42.7 (Compost, explained at last)
The compost bin of Example 13.9 now reads as an appliance: a decomposer workshop stocked with peelings. Worms, woodlice and the unseen crews dismantle the kitchen’s organic waste to dark humus; the gardener spreads it, and its minerals feed the beds (Remark 22.5). The heap even runs warm — the decomposers’ own burning (Proposition 41.6) heats their workshop.