LiveCam at
Zion National Park . Utah
LiveCam at Bandon . Oregon
May
7
Detritus is everywhere but we don’t often think about or even see it. It happens in the forest, on the streets of cities but is most obvious when it happens in water. The shorelines around Bandon are full of sea foam or detritus today. It’s beautiful but ugly. To put it bluntly it’s the “crap” of the sea. It’s full of broken down organic material from all sorts of formerly living things. The foam is full of nutrients for other creatures farther down the food chain.
According to Wikipedia: when micro-organisms die, fine organic particles are produced, and if these are eaten by small animals which feed on micro-organisms, they will collect inside the intestine, and change shape into large pellets of dung. As a result of this process, most of the materials from dead organisms disappears from view and is not obviously present in any recognizable form, but is in fact present in the form of a combination of fine organic particles and the organisms using them as nutrients. This combination is detritus.