With all our monsoon rain, it feels more like a rain forest than a desert around here. Even mushrooms have burst from the wet soil. They remind me to appreciate the overlooked but important workers of ...

Slugs. They’re slimy. They’re sticky. And they make some people squirm. The largest type of slug in the United States, named for its yellow body, is the banana slug. Some banana slugs also have brown ...

A banana slug inches along a tree branch. According to Beth Chisholm, community horticultural coordinator for Washington State University’s Whatcom County Extension, slugs are decomposers, animals ...

The researchers isolated plots within natural ecosystems and separated the plots from accessing plant roots with a plastic barrier (a technique known as ‘root trenching’) ...

The chemical structure of organic matter has been shown to be only marginally important for its decomposability by microorganisms. The question of why organic matter does accumulate in the face of ...