detritivore

A detritivore is an organism that eats dead or decaying plants or animals as food. Detritivores include microorganisms such as bacteria and larger organisms such as fungi, insects, worms, and some crustaceans.

Detritivore is a combination of the word detritus and the suffix -vore. Detritus means waste or debris—in this case, dead plants and animals. The suffix -vore means “one that eats,” as seen in herbivore (plant eater) and carnivore (meat eater). So a detritivore eats dead plants and animals. Animals classified as scavengers also eat dead matter, but on a larger scale.

Detritivores are an essential part of the food chain because they help to break down dead plant or animal matter. This returns essential nutrients to the ecosystem and helps to prevent a buildup of dead or rotting material that could spread disease and have other negative consequences.

Without even knowing the science behind it, you would probably guess that it would be bad (and gross) if nothing happened to dead plants and animals and they just sat there and rotted. Good thing that nature comes with its own cleanup crew: detritivores. Detritivore is a relatively new term that has been used in life sciences since at least the 1960s to refer to a wide variety of not-particularly-cute organisms, including worms, crabs, termites, beetles, cockroaches, snails, slugs, and millipedes.

Although there is a wide range of detritivores that look and act very differently, they all have something in common: their appetite for dead or decaying plant and animal matter. It’s a dirty job, but an important one. Rotting matter is often filled with disease-causing organisms that can be harmful to animals, but it still has important nutrients inside it that plants and fungi could absorb if they were broken down first. That’s where detritivores come in, breaking down flesh and dead plants into nutrients, such as carbon and nitrogen, that plants and other organisms need.

Detritivores aren’t the only organisms that break down dead matter. They belong to a class of organisms called decomposers. But decomposers work in different ways, and not all decomposers are detritivores. Scavengers like vultures and sharks also eat dead stuff, but they’re much bigger, so they consume much more at a time. We may take it for granted that the dead stuff on the forest or ocean floor eventually decays and disappears, but it doesn’t eat itself—detritivores are on the job, feasting right under our feet.

Detritivores are responsible for a huge percentage of the world’s decomposition and can be found throughout the planet. Some invasive detritivores have even managed to survive and thrive on an island of Antarctica!

This video shows footage of sea stars (starfish), which are aquatic detritivores, feeding on a dead fish.

The goal? Disentangling the effect of rainfall quantity, rainfall frequency and detritivore community composition on litter decomposition.

The actors? Two millipedes and 1 isopod species ⬇️ (Photos by M. Coulis) pic.twitter.com/ThdO4W4lII

— François-Xavier Joly (@FxJoly) August 27, 2018

i'm gonna quit school and live in the woods as a full time detritivore

— 🖤 Scritch 🖤 (@scratchdej) November 7, 2017

• decomposer
• scavenger
• decomposition
• detritus
• carrion
• decay

Based on its diet, which of the following creatures is a detritivore?

A. a bear that eats garbage from trash cans
B. a jackal that sometimes eats animals killed by other predators
C. a spider that eats flies and smaller spiders
D. a slug that eats dead leaves and dead worms