Soil Ecologists as Detectives Discovering Who Eats Whom or What in the Soil

Abstract

Did you ever notice that dead leaves never accumulate in forests? For that service, we can thank a cleaning team of tiny recyclers living in the soil. Dead organisms are their food source, and they recycle them by just eating them. Knowing who eats what or whom in soils is essential to understand this recycling machinery. But that is hard to know, because many soil animals are tiny, hidden in the soil, and unable to tell us what they ate! To bypass these difficulties, soil ecologists have developed a special method. They track specific markers of bacteria, fungi, and plants in the fat of animals and hence can identify what they fed on. Some animals consume a large variety of food sources, others are more specific. Remarkably, many organisms have developed amazing strategies to feed in soil, because finding food in such a dark maze is not that easy!