Soil is an important component of the Diaper Cycle as it helps regulate important ecosystem processes, such as nutrient uptake, decomposition, and water availability. Trees cannot even survive without small creatures in soil. Today let’s take a look at a part of ecosystems underground, with less scientific words, in a simple way.
Small creatures like worms and microbes play an important role in soil ecosystems. They eat decaying roots, leaves, and animal excreta. In doing so creatures decompose them into nutrients which plants can absorb through their roots. Someday those decaying things disappear from our sight.
Worms decompose organic matters less sufficiently than microbes do. So, worms eat soil with microbes, and then, those microbes get more active inside a worm’s body compared to outside because of full water and their foods in there. Microbes decompose and convert lots of organic matters into the worm’s nutrients. As a result, the worm absorbs nutrition from the soil.
Worms keep excreting the soil in the form of small crumb structure while eating soil and expanding their life territory around the plant roots. Some kids might say it looks like the Dippin' Dots ice cream in soil color if they see that form of the structure for the first time. Crumb structure keeps enough space to store air and water between each of the crumbs. In other words, this structure helps plants to grow their tiny and soft roots into the soil.
Thus, small creatures help trees grow. And elements are circulating between living trees and soils. Some of them would form a fruit and leave the cycle as a human picks it up to eat.
Imagine that the elements which your body consists of might have been circling round in that cycle.
Isn’t it interesting?
Author: Takaharu Fukui