Most folks have an aversion to dead, rotting, and decaying things. They smell bad, they have a weird texture, they’re just simply gross. Most of us, if we had it our way, wouldn’t deal with the slime that forms in the bottom of the garbage can. However, in a strange way, this is the stuff of life: in the unmaking of things that once lived, the new foundations of life are found.

We are on the verge of a holiday in which we celebrate our fascination with death. Halloween mostly focuses on the spiritual side this. I thought we could think about what happens to the corporeal after life.

Things certainly don’t just fall apart by themselves. We can’t just throw our yard waste in a pile and expect it to turn to compost immediately. A whole host of organisms, we’ll broadly call decomposers, break them down. On a simplistic level, a decomposer picks apart the larger pieces in the process of getting sustenance, leaving divisions in its wake.

There are fungi, bacteria, insects, and even vertebrates that aid in decomposition. If we get into it, only fungi and bacteria really break things down enough to be considered fully “decomposed,” broken into essential ingredients of life like nitrogen or carbon. The rest are just detritivores that aid the process. No matter the role, they’re all important. So let’s consider some possibly familiar, and less familiar, decomposers that live on the Hill.

Carrion Beetles (Silphidae) — I have a not so secret love of dead animals. Yet, my willingness to handle a dead creature is based on how far gone it is. Carrion beetles, of the family Silphidae, are often my cue that I’ve probably arrived too late.

Carrion beetles live on the flesh of dead animals. They arrive to burrow in, eat the other live insects like fly larvae that are on corpses, or bury a portion to raise their young on. Many species prefer larger dead animals, meaning that we may not see them a lot on the Hill, but they’re definitely there, (I suspect we probably just don’t want to get close enough to look). A favorite fact is that in their travels from corpse to corpse, they are good conveyances for other creatures, including mites that travel with them to infest maggots growing on the dead. This in turn helps eliminate competition, leaving the beetles to all the remains. (I would not blame you if this spoiled your appetite.)

Bacillus subtilis  — The microbial world feels fathomless to someone like me who has spent their life understanding the obviously visible biome. I am no microbiologist, so my simplistic talking about bacteria is out of appreciation, not because that world is anything close to completely understood or a banal subject. It cannot be overstated that the landscapes we live on, as well as our internal landscapes rely on bacteria. One of the species we humans know a fair amount about is the cosmopolitan Bacillus subtilis.

 

An english name given to this species is grass bacillus, as it’s common in the topsoil and the plant matter found there. It is also found in human guts, and in those of ruminants, like cows. One of the more well known Bacillus species, it has been adopted as a model organism for scientific study. This species is extremely adaptable, which means it can eat a variety of things, but they do a lot of work breaking down the little bits of life as part of the nitrogen and carbon cycles, rebuilding soil. They are not considered pathogenic (they don’t generally make us sick), and are even used as fungicides in some agricultural practices.

My favorite thing about them is that they can endure extreme conditions with no nutrients, and even radiation and chemical onslaughts. One strain existed in dormancy for 6 years in space on a NASA satellite. They do this by forming a shell like encasement, called an endospore. Within this they can wait around for ideal conditions. An endospore is also quite capable of being carried on the wind, likely a reason why the species is so widespread.

Black Bread Mold (Rhizopus stolonifer) — There is nothing worse than finding a nice loaf of bread with mold growing on it. What you possibly never realized is that all bread molds are actually fungus. Black bread mold also one of the most common molds across the entire planet and it doesn’t just exist on bread, that’s just what we most associate it with.

Those little hairs that you see on your bread, or even on fruit, play a similar role that a mushroom plays for other types of fungus. They are the part of the organism that is releasing spores to reproduce. These tiny spores are how mold suddenly appears on your bread, they’re floating about, waiting. It is only a matter of time before they strike. When black bread mold first starts growing, it may appear lighter in color. As the spores reach maturity and get ready to be released, they darken, changing the overall appearance and helping coin the name. Penicillin is also derived from a type of bread mold; the antibiotic metabolites are produced by Penicillium mold to exclude competing bacteria.

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