The Nutrient Cycle - Soil: Reflections on the Basis of our Existence - page 88

Future fungus food . The Tiputini River is hemmed by a green curtain of rainforest on either side
of the river. Monkeys and colourful birds like to visit the spreading crown of the kapok tree, the
tallest in the forest
light-dependent species. I later saw the remains of a kapok tree that had fallen long
before: the glade in the forest had closed up and all that remained of the tree was a
mossy stump of plank roots. I could see where the trunk must have lain but could
find not a single remnant of wood: everything had rotted away. Here and there I
saw depressions in the ground, like a giant's footprints, that Meyer told me were
left by trees that had decomposed right down to their roots. The contrast with the
forests of Sweden, where it takes many years for tree stumps to revert to moss-
covered mounds, could not have been starker. Tree stumps in the northern part of
the country can take hundreds of years to decompose due to the powerful preserv-
ative properties of pine resin.
Another example of ultra-slow decomposition is the Bocksten Man, the
remains of a medieval man buried in a peat bog in Varberg, western Sweden.
The man had been murdered, with stakes driven through his body by his attack-
ers in the belief they would prevent his spirit from haunting them. The stakes still
remained well preserved after more than eight hundred years in the bog. Compare
that to the rainforest trees that vanish without trace—bar a hole in the ground—in
a few short years. The contrast is explained by oxygen availability, which regu-
lates the pace of the decomposition process. Oxygen struggles to penetrate damp
bogland, just as it does a wet compost heap. Anaerobic bacteria work slowly and
fungi struggle to survive in oxygen-deprived conditions. Bog environments are
also acidic, further slowing the decomposition process.