Nov
22

What are some types of desert animals that are detritivores?

By Cow


i only need 2 of them i have searched but can’t find any. please help and thanks for answering.

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1

Ecology
Millipedes are detritivores, foraging for decaying organic material (in the desert, generally in sandy washes). They are nocturnal and prefer humid environments, often appearing on roads after soaking summer thunderstorms. They are good burrowers and spend most of their time underground. If disturbed, the millipede rolls into a coil. If further threatened, it exudes foul-tasting chemicals from openings along the sides of its body. These noxious substances are the millipede’s only defense, since it doesn’t bite.

Termites are important in the South Texas ecosystem, and caution should be used in interpreting and applying short term, narrowly focused experiments on termite removal. For one thing, desert termites, or rather their gut flora, are now known to fix atmospheric nitrogen (Schaefer and Whitford, 1981). Furthermore, they remove organic carbon from the surface, especially during drought, so that less of that resource is available to denitrifying bacteria near the soil surface when rains return. Termites also protect mesquite-fixed nitrogen from volatilization and/or leaching by moving it well underground where it is stored in termite biomass. In the short term, this nitrogen is not available to the shallow rooted grasses of the system (Parker et al., 1982) but in the long run it is, as the mating flights after rains put millions of termites into the food chain across the entire landscape (Schaefer and Whitford, 1981). Like shrub clumps, termites fix, accumulate, protect and slowly leak mineralized nitrogen into the system. We need to know much more about these and other desert detritivores (El-Ayouty et al., 1978: Crawford, 1979) before planning to remove or manipulate them.

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