A red-legged grasshopperFLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS, ARRANET
Looking at the interplay between living organisms and the soil chemistry that in turn supports life, researchers have found that stressed insects die with less nitrogen in their bodies, providing fewer nutrients to the soil and slowing the rate of plant-matter decomposition. The study, published last week (June 14) in Science, suggests that insect interactions and diversity can have a dramatic impact on the soil fertility, and consequently, on ecosystem health.
“We were interested in bridging two subfields of ecology—organism ecology and biogeochemistry—in a way to make predictions about how food web structure can affect nutrient cycling,” first author Dror Hawlena of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told Nature.
The researchers housed one set of grasshoppers together with predatory spiders, which had their mouth-anatomy glued ...
