Soil microbial communities are diverse and interconnected in a complex web of trophic interactions (Clarholm, 1994; Neutel et al., 2002), so that identifying all of the individual species in these food webs is currently impractical. Such diversity begs for beginning with a more modular approach that aggregates species into trophic compartments (Moore et al., 2004; Schmitz, 2010) in which microbes are middle trophic levels that interact with detrital resources and predators. A useful starting point is either to focus on dominant microbial species or taxa (e.g., Clarholm, 1985; Crowther et al., 2011a) or examine whole microbial community function using changes in biomass or exoenzyme activity (Ritz et al., 1994). Both of these methods have been used to explore how microbes participate in trophic interactions that include detritus and detritivores