plants and bacteria would struggle without animals and fungi as well, everything depends on like literally the entire earth's ecosystems to survive to some degree.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
like fungi recycle dead things into an absurd amount of nutrients, without them trees especially would barely break down and just stick around until very very eventually they turn into coal.
this is just such a cool thing to think about, there was a time when there were just dead trees everywhere in forests, like just laying there being logs or whatever, just piles and piles of dead trees and that's where coal comes from.
The people mining and dying and polluting the planet just digging out piles of dead trees.
Not plants and bacteria, many of them can survive off sunlight and minerals broken down from stones, such as lichen. Although I guess lichen is a combination of plants, bacteria and fungi