It happens

According to the Humane Society, there are 78.2 million owned dogs in the United States. Chances are you or someone you know has some dog feces that needs to be picked up! What a great chore for kids!

We usually pick up the yard once a week in the winter and everyday in the summer.  This is usually to keep down on the amount of flies, as in suburban/urban areas flies are the primary decomposers of feces. However, there are some areas where dung beetles are still plentiful and play an important part in decomposition.

In this post, we are going to investigate what happens after we pick up the waste - it's a perfect opportunity to showcase decomposers in the food web. We looked at the bag of dog food, which had lots of great pictures of the meat and vegetables that were ingredients.  Our dogs also enjoy quite a few table scraps, including many vegetables.  My children are young, so we kept as simple as plants get their energy to create food from the sun and their roots collect water and nutrients from the soil. For older children, you could elaborate on photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation.

After we collected all the dog feces we buried it in an effort to keep some of the flies off; and perhaps catch a dung beetle. It's not quite warm enough for lots of insect activity; so we'll come back after a few weeks to dig things up to see what we find.

Once things warm up, we will also be making a series of posts about arboreal carrion and dung traps, which is a great way to keep your bait out of the paws of critters like raccoon, opossums, and coyotes.