One of the biggest connections I discovered was one I hadn’t really thought about; animals and plants create waste. Trees drop leaves and animals create waste called droppings and of course animals and plants die, adding to the waste. What happens to all this waste? The answer is all this waste is waiting energy for earthworms, insects, fungi and bacteria. In other words, decomposers!

What is a decomposer?

Decomposers are living things called detritivores. They are responsible for breaking down all the wastes and dead organisms that would otherwise pile up and rot, producing odors and disease.

Decomposers break down all this waste, reducing it and returning it to the ecosystem. Scavengers are often known as “the last stop” on a food chain because they feed on other animals that are dead by reducing them into more manageable pieces once they are finished. That allows the decomposers to take over by breaking down the remaining material into even smaller pieces even more.

This material ends up in the soil along with other waste and is taken up by the plants in the form of nutrients.

Decomposers put the energy back into the ecosystem and can be considered the ultimate recyclers and are as important as all the other links in the food chain.

What are those holes?

During my childhood I jumped in piles of leaves, raked leaves in a cleanup chore, threw leaves up in the air just to watch them swirl through the air and land at my feet again, marched through them, making that wonderful swish-swish sound, and walked on the leaves that had fallen to the forest floor.

During all these activities I had seen leaves with various holes in them and had never really given them any thought until I started working on the decomposer lesson.

The oak shothole leaf miner is a small fly, and when I looked this fly up, found it was the Japanagromyza viridula.

I thought right away to myself that this was yet another invasive species given the name, but these flies are considered native to the United States, although little is known about this species and other leaf miners.

The oak shothole leaf miner produces three types of leaf damage: holes, dark brown blotches and skeletonization.

The first type of damage happens when the females use their sharp ovipositors to pierce the buds, causing nutrient-rich sap to be released, which they lap up. As the leaves unfurl in the spring, the holes are symmetrical because the ovipositors pierce through both sides of the buds.

Although these holes are small at first, they expand as the leaves grow, eventually giving the leaves a characteristic “Swiss cheese” appearance.

The second type of damage happens when the females pierce the leaves and lay eggs inside the leaves’ tissues. The tiny larvae hatch and create blotch mines as they eat the leaves until they mature.

Once mature, they leave their mines and drop to the soil where they pupate and spend the rest of the summer and the winter. There is only one generation each spring, so oak shothole leaf miners are not considered to be significant pests of oak, and the damage caused does not have a significant impact on the overall health of the trees.

The mines are light green to tan but turn brown once they’re abandoned when the larvae are finished feeding and drop to the soil below to finish their life cycles. The damaged tissue eventually drops from the mines to produce large and ragged-edged holes. Both the female feeding holes and the larval leaf “mine” damage remain throughout the rest of the growing season of the trees.

The third type of damage is known as “oak tatters” and is described as such because the leaves’ tissues are eaten away, leaving the supporting structures in place. This damage is caused by the oak shothole leaf miner as well as other invertebrates like caterpillars, sawflies, grasshoppers, and beetle larvae.

I have discovered the older I get the more aware I am of all the wonderful things nature has to show me.

Jeannie Carl is a naturalist at the Carbon County Environmental Education Center in Summit Hill. The center rehabilitates injured animals and educates the public on a variety of wildlife found in the area. For information on the Carbon County Environmental Center, visit www.carboneec.org.