Soil Food Web? Sounds Made Up!

There's a lot of life in the stuff we step on

I assure you, the soil food web is not made up! Although, we have only learned so much about it in the past 30 years or so.

As with all energy in this world, it begins with the sun. The sun shines down its energy and through the miracle of photosynthesis, we have plants that become organic matter, breath in carbon dioxide and breath out oxygen. Alas, not long for this world, at some points, the plants or at least some parts of the plant, die.

In comes our friends bacteria. Bacteria can do a bunch of different things. Some of them can actually break down rock, sand, silt and clay into usable components for plants in the soil. For the sake of brevity, what these bacteria do is eat a lot of the nutrients that the plant can't use and then poop them out (or they are eaten and then those guys poop out the extra nutrients)

Fungi are their own kingdom in the tree of life. They do not photosynthesize, but instead secret digestive enzymes. They also help in the breakdown of organic matter and with nutrient cycling.

But since there is always a bigger fish, these little guys have predators, the smallest of which are protozoa. These feed not just on organic matter but also bacteria and other microorganisms. Protozoa eat the bacteria and the fungi, pooping out the nutrients that the plants need. Nematodes vary in size. They are in almost every ecosystem and quite adaptive.

Another predatory microorganism is the arthropod. These are what we can begin to readily see with our own eyes and what we would generally classify as soil bugs that might creep us out. There are millions of these species and can be generally found everywhere, despite humanity's best efforts at times.

Once we get to larger nematodes and arthropods we jump to larger species that we know and love. Birds love insects, land animals also love eating insects as well and we go on and on.

I write all of this to say that although we might be familiar with a food web above the surface, there is a food web below the surface as well, whose main goal is to provide the nutrients and elements necessary for plants to thrive and produce food ... also for us.