LIFE AND DEATH AND LIFE

Edgar M. Reilly, Jr.

Each moment of each day sees the death of some living thing. We know that each plant and animal, by natural tendency, produces far more seeds and eggs, and seedlings and young, than is necessary to maintain its population. This occurs because each species has an insecure hold on life. Moreover, death is necessary for the survival of life, and the death rate must just about equal the birth rate. If all the seeds and eggs created through the life processes survived and grew to adulthood, there could be no life able to continue through this over-crowding.

A pair of American robins nest in one backyard raising two broods of four each. Ten robins where there were two. These pair up and return to equally successful nestlings each year. No matter how much one likes robins, over 90 million birds in one yard at the end of the tenth year would be too much. And there would not be enough worms to feed them!

Nature allows a seeming excess because the difficulties of life restrict survival of both young and old, and the result of this delicate balance is that populations rise and fall in small numbers; only rarely do they rise to disastrous millions or fall to complete zero. Both plants and animals may reach ages where they are no longer able to reproduce, but usually before old age is reached sickness, storm, and slowed reactions to danger will have eliminated many individuals. Even a few strong and mature individuals die from disease or under the attacks of a predator.

Life is the moving, ever-aggressive force. When any form of life dies, certain life processes take over and act out the saying "Waste not, want not." Every atom and molecule of a living plant or animal was molded by life into a form that is a certain species of life. Those very elements and compounds are needed to continue life, and nature is fairly efficient in recycling them.

The controlling factor of life is really "supply and demand." A grass eating animal cannot exist without grass, a predator without prey, a plant without certain basic chemicals or certain kinds of soil. When prey species are rare, the population of predators declines; and when plants lack certain soil, chemical and weather conditions, they decline. Theoretically we would need only to replace those few chemicals filtered out of the soils by water and winds if each of our farm crops were plowed back under the ground, but then we wouldn't have an life-sustaining crops to eat. To raise our crops we need to fertilize by returning chemicals to the soil. It is part of life: through death and decomposing, nature keeps wildlife going.

Why do we find large "pools" of fossil plants and animals but none of recent origin? Actually such concentrations are found today when natural disasters occur, but our minds remain on the disasters and forget the numerous dead. The volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD killed many people in the ancient Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii where we may still see some of their remains. Every flood kills and buries thousands of animals; a sudden flood entering a saltwater cove, or sheltered inlet, will bury and kill literally millions of seashore living things, perhaps not to be seen again until dug up as fossil during some distant millennium. What may seem like a common occurrence in the fossil-filled rocks exposed to our eyes, is a series of scattered events from a past millions upon millions of years long.

We do come across the remains of plants and animals as we travel through our woods arid fields. Some we are unable to see because what is left is covered by leaf-litter (the dead parts of trees which are an annual contribution from the productivity of the forests). Others escape our eyes because they are discolored by the processes of drying out, and the very odors of death are masked by the smells of new and different life. In the tropics, areas of constant warmth and moisture, the decomposers and scavengers work in greater numbers, more swiftly, and efficiently. The same processes are at work on both plants and animals in the seas as well as on the lands. Life recycles almost 100 percent of life; very rarely does a body, or a small part of a body, escape recycling for long. Even man's carefully buried past generations eventually are reached by the powers of decay—of life.

Do you want to know what happened to the past dead? Do you want to see death? Look around you at the beauties of nature, at the thousands of forms of plant and animal life wherever you may be. Look closely, because death is life; it is simply hard to see because of life.