In bogs and other mires, sphagnum moss wages a multi-layered biological warfare strategy to (very slowly) dominate an area by starving other plants of nutrients. This warfare includes acidity (causing minerals to bind with each other so plants can't use them), stagnation of water (depriving organisms of oxygen, including the microbes responsible for decay, preventing further nutrients from entering the system), and release of sphagnan, a chemical that tans microbes, and causes bog bodies...
This is the same substance that tans the skin of bog bodies, reddening their hair, and toughening their skin to the point that every wrinkle is preserved, while the acidity leeches the calcium from the bones, and the weight of growing moss distorts the bones that have been weakened to cardboard.
@tippitiwichet Awesome!
@DMArt55555 I agree, lol. It is the coolest. Bogs are so bad@ss.
@tippitiwichet Nature is truly amazing!
The same effect happens on the microbes responsible for decay, and their surfaces toughen, that they can no longer swim, and they fall useless from the water, and all that falls in the bog stays there forever, unable to be absorbed by the growing plants above.
This is how I get to sketch bog bodies for a coloring book titled "How a Venus Flytrap Digests It's Prey", because naturally, we must know why they need to eat flies (there are no nutrients in the bogs) the end.