Interactions in Ecosystems

The assignment, photograph interactions in ecosystems, was full of possibilities.  Everywhere you look there are interactions.  And, like Aldo Leopold, John Muir and other naturalists, I see the world of connectedness.  So this assignment would be easy.  But....

I wanted to find something no one else would think of.  Not that I'm competitive, but I am!  So I walked the trail through my woods one more time with interactions in mind.  Everything is connected, but I wanted to find the most unusual thing to connect with other organisms in the ecosystem.  After one loop around the "Blue Bottle Trail", I saw flowers with hovering insects, mushrooms on dead logs, turtles dropping into the stream, and woodpeckers chiseling at the bark of a tree.  It would be possible to photograph some of these things, but nothing seemed unusual to me.  So, on one more trip along the trail, I looked ahead and the sun shone just right through the trees.  I had it!  My connection......

This old oak had died and then fallen in the woods.  The interaction was unmistakable as you look at the sunshine in the photo.  While growing, this tree had shaded everything under it, but now that it was dead, light would hit the forest floor allowing other plants and tree seedlings to grow and thrive.  In fact, I found plants and seedlings all around where the tree had fallen.  They were soaking up the sun.

In exploring the dead tree, I realized there had been thousands and thousands of interactions while the tree was standing dead and now while it was on the ground.  There would have been the woodpeckers finding insects beneath the bark, birds building nests in the trees, raccoons finding shelter, and much more while it was standing dead.  Then, on the ground, I saw evidence of decomposers-- millipedes, wood roaches, mushrooms and mosses.  Then there were the thousands of unseen species as well.

But, the sunlight hitting the ground, now that the tree was dead, was an important interaction in the continuation of the forest.  Light is the driving force of this ecosystem, and this giant, now on the ground, was impacting the other plants by allowing this driving force to reach the other organisms.