Life defends on nature's effective recycling system

No longer is it just the few environment conscious individuals who regularly recycle their waste, for the district council's new curbside collection has brought this practise to us all.

Nature has long recognised the importance of recycling and there are an enormous amount of organisms that devote their lives to recycling natural leftover nutrients and materials.

This process is central to the continuation of life and almost all life defends on nature's effective recycling system.

Some of the most important natural recyclers are microscopic, but there are tens of thousands which you can readily see and encounter on land, as most are soil-based.

This is probably due to the fact that when things are discarded or die they usually end up lying on the ground, where these soil based recyclers such as nematode and annelid worms, and crawling insects such as woodlife and dung beetles can rapidly set about their work.

However, probably the most spectacular are airborne, such as the ones that take the form of fungal spores drifting in on the breeze or specialist decomposers who seem to almost magically detect the scent of a dead animal only moments after it has deceased.

Recently, I found a hapless jay that had died on a grassy patch near a path I walk twice daily as a matter of routine.

When I first found the bird it was 5pm and I knew it had not been there previously at 8am that day. I had a look at it and there was no obvious sign of injury and no sign of decay.

When I next passed it the following morning, the carcass had attracted the attention of half a dozen or so centimetre long, metallic brown beetles of indeterminate species.

Within a week the bird was wriggling with life, maggots from fresh flies and pale yellowy-white beetle grubs.

Things were a bit smelly so I did not look too deeply. A further five days elapsed and the pale colour of bone could then be seen in among the few scattered remains and feathers.

It would now have been almost impossible to judge the bird a jay.

It is one of our instincts to be repulsed by decay. I suppose it is a natural reflex to keep us away from the potentially damaging micro organisms that thrive on it, but as I looked just a little too closely at the decaying remains it was not a micro organism that gave me a nasty turn.

Just like a nightmarish creature from a horror movie, a larval beetle, probably the offspring of the beetles I encountered on the first day emerged.

It was large, about 1.5cm in length and a ghostly pale green. It had six claw-like legs, which propelled it effortlessly across the surface of the corpse before it slithered away from sight into a crevice in the body cavity. It gave me the creeps.

Some people have made a profession of studying these animals and detailed knowledge of these creatures has even helped to solve murders by determining the time of death. I think I will stick to observations of less ghoulish creatures in the future.