index > Today's Earth, Our Future > 7. Let's not be wasteful > There is No Waste in Nature

There is No Waste in Nature

As mentioned in the section before this one ("To Live is to Make Trash"), lions leave bones after gobbling up their prey, zebras leave their dung on the ground and plants drop their leaves. Every living thing produces garbage. But then, why is there no waste problem in the jungles or meadows of Africa?

Have you heard of a bird called a "vulture"? Their job is to clean up. When they find the remains of dead animal, first, the large-sized vultures will eat it, then the medium-sized vultures eat some, and finally the small vultures eat up all the rest except for the bones and skin. After the vultures fly away, small insects, worms and bacteria eat the remaining bones and skin until nothing is left. In other words, everything returns to the earth and becomes nutrients for the soil.

Do you know what a "dung beetle" is? This insect was featured in a famous collection of books by French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre called "Souvenirs entomologiques." As you might guess from their name, dung beetles are beetles that roll balls of animal dung into tunnels that they dug, and feed themselves with it or to lay eggs in it so that their larvae can feed on the dung right after they hatch from the eggs.

Have you seen a bug roll into a ball when you poke it? This bug is called a pill bug or a wood louse, and it eats the rotting fallen leaves. An earthworm gets nutrients by swallowing pieces of fallen leaves and dry grass that are mixed with the soil. The swallowed soil then gets excreted as dung.

Because these insects and bacteria live by feeding on animal remains, dung or fallen leaves, there is no waste in nature. But we should remember that until animal bones--like those left by lions after they feed on their prey--take a long time to return to the earth. It's a long process for those tiny insects and even tinier bacteria to decompose them (break them down), even though they work hard at it.

All living things take in some form of nutrients and excrete waste from their bodies. Animal waste is an important source of nutrients for other living things.

In nature, plants grow with the help of nutrients in the soil, animals eat the plants, and insects and bacteria eat and decompose animal dung and animal remains. The decomposed waste nourishes soil, and the soil helps plants grow. In this way, waste matter and nutrients circulate among plants and animals as if a baton is being passed from one to another as in a relay race. This means that the waste of every living thing is necessary to maintain the cycle of life. That is why there is no waste in jungles and meadows.

Now, among all the many varieties of living things on earth, it is only we humans that have to collect and dispose our own waste. Why do you think this is so?

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