Eventually, all living things die. And except in very rare cases, all of those dead things will rot. But that’s not the end of it. What rots will wind up becoming part of something else.
This is how nature recycles. Just as death marks the end of an old life, the decay and decomposition that soon follow provide material for new life.
“Decomposition breaks apart dead bodies,” explains Anne Pringle. She’s a biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.
