When grasshoppers live in an environment where they are afraid of spiders their nitrogen content falls.
Then when they then die, their bodies take longer to decompose.
And they add less nitrogen to the soil.
“We are dealing here with an absolutely new kind of mechanism whereby every small chemical change in a creature can regulate the natural cycle, thus in effect affecting the ecology in total, such as the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere (through decomposition) and field crop productivity,”
“We are gaining a greater understanding of the necessity of conserving all of the component parts of the ecosystem in general and of predators in particular.”
We are all one system.
Losing even one species could transform the ecology of the earth.
http://israel21c.org/environment/grasshopper-anxieties-lead-to-soil-changes/