Decompose

An old Bengal tiger lies down beneath a teak tree in the forests of central India and does not get up. What happens next will involve hundreds of species, reshape the soil for decades, and carry pieces of him as far as the Arabian Sea.

Decompose follows a single body from the last heartbeat to the last fragment of bone. Each chapter takes up one stage of decay, or one of the organisms that drives it, as two hundred kilograms of apex predator becomes forest, river, and air.

Within hours, the bacteria of his own gut breach the intestinal wall and begin the chemistry of putrefaction. Blowflies arrive within minutes, tuned to the scent of death, and the maggot mass that follows runs hotter than the tropical air around it. Jackals, a handful of the vultures India nearly lost, hyenas, hide beetles, parasitoid wasps, termites, and a bone-hoarding porcupine each take their turn. Beneath the body, the soil turns into an island of altered chemistry, ringed by ammonia fungi and threaded with hyphae that carry the tiger's nitrogen into living trees. And the bones, those engineered composites of collagen and mineral, weather through sun, monsoon rain, fire, roots, and lichen until, a decade later, almost nothing remains.

Along the way, Decompose explains how forensic scientists read the insects on a body like a clock, why diclofenac nearly wiped out South Asia's vultures and what that cost in human lives, and how a dead animal's nutrients travel through a chain of reservoirs to the sea.

Grounded in forensic science, soil ecology, and taphonomy, and written for curious general readers, Decompose is a book about what happens after an ending, and about why, in the economy of nature, nothing that dies is ever lost.

For readers of Entangled Life, Stiff, and The Hidden Life of Trees.