They remind me to appreciate the overlooked but important workers of nature's clean-up crew, the decomposers. These animals, plants, fungi and bacteria eat dead stuff and help it break down.

There are lots of factors in how quickly organic material decomposes into compost, including creatures called decomposers. Find out what kind of things are part of nature’s clean-up crew.

Here we demonstrate, based on an individual-based microbial community model, that social dynamics among microbes producing extracellular enzymes (‘decomposers’) and microbes exploiting the ...

“They’re sort of nature’s greatest decomposers, disassemblers, by far better than and more powerful than bacteria, animals, and plants,” McCoy said. “They break all kinds of stuff down.” Mushrooms ...