Like if a dead person was sealed inside a plastic container and put in a building with no access to dirt or other organic matter, how would they decay? Are there maggots/parasites/fungi/bacteria that live on our bodies that start the decaying process? Is that the same thing that happens when a body part dies/becomes necrotic?
Do those organisms that cause decay live in every kind of soil?
In: Biology
Maggots and parasites probably (hopefully) aren’t in or on you, but bacteria live all over and inside of you. There are also fungal spores pretty much on every surface on the planet waiting to grow into fungus.
Your immune system keeps those things in check so they don’t harm you (most of the time). Some of the bacteria are actually quite helpful as long as they stay where they’re supposed to be. When you die, your heart is no longer providing any oxygen to your cells, so your immune system shuts down and stops keeping the bacteria from spreading and the fungal spores from growing.
Many of the bacteria species in your body can live quite happily without oxygen. In fact, some of the most important decomposer bacteria on Earth are anaerobic and require an environment devoid of oxygen. That said, normal, natural decomposition is a complex process that involves a lot of decomposers, including bacteria, fungi, and scavengers like maggots or even large animals like buzzards. Yes, decomposers live just about everywhere on Earth today. Millions of years ago, that wasn’t always the case. Some particularly tough organic molecules like the lignin in trees was too difficult to break down and nothing yet evolved a way to do it. So, trees died and just kind of sat there until they got buried by the wind and rain. Eventually, mutations lead to bacteria and fungi that had the enzymes necessary to digest the lignin.
For a long time in Earth’s history there simply weren’t a lot of decomposers and any dead stuff took a very long time to break down, if it broke down at all. That’s how oil formed – dead plankton in the ocean sank and got buried before it could be digested. Today, dead stuff mostly won’t form oil or coal because there are enough decomposers that it rarely lasts long enough to get buried.
Stuffing you into a plastic bag will certain slow the process down by cutting out a lot of those decomposers, but it won’t stop it entirely.
Your body (and mine and everyone else’s) is teeming with microbes. Somewhere between 60% and 90% of all cells in and on your body are not yours – they are bacteria and their ilk. Many of these help keep you alive, but once you’re dead, some will turn on you in a heartbeat (or lack of heartbeat as it were). Decay and rot is unavoidable, although sealing a body away or doing something extreme like launching it into the vacuum of space will slow the process and leave a far more desiccated corpse that doesn’t rot away like a body buried in soil.
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