Death casts a shadow over life, not only for people but also other animals, plants and entire ecosystems.
In some ways, the phenomenon is well known. A fallen tree sprouts a plethora of mushrooms while also hosting ants, beetles and the creatures that feast on them.
But a new paper argues that these forces play important yet poorly understood roles in nearly all ecosystems, with the remnants of certain species exerting significant influence long after they die.
The study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, claims to be “the first continental-scale assessment of how live foundation species are influenced by their dead counterparts.”
These “foundation species” generally provide the physical architecture of an ecosystem and tend to be its most abundant organisms—trees, grasses, corals, oysters. The study examined data from 10 ecosystems, ranging from the tropics to subpolar, from montane to marine.
