Some gross stuff

Today was the last day of my entomology residential and what a fun day it was.

The main topic today was forensic entomology and if you're a fan of CSI you'll have an idea what that is. If you don't, well basically when an animal dies it is immediately occupied by various organisms that help break it down. The amount of those organisms, the type and their stage of development gives you an idea of how long the animal (or person) has been dead.

For our prac we had four plates of chicken drumsticks on a bed of soil. These plates had been left outside for varying amounts of time, from fourteen days down to one day. We had to cut open the drumsticks and count up what we found in them.

We started off with the one day old plate. There were four of us in my group, but only two of us put on the rubber gloves and cut up the chicken. Day one wasn't too bad, we found one small Rove beetle and the chicken smelled a bit, but it wasn't too bad.

Onto plate two, which was three days old and as soon as I cut it open the maggots started to come out. I think it was about this stage that one of our group had to go outside for some fresh air, and she wasn't alone.

Plate three was a week old, smelled a bit more and had some really fat maggots in it. Out of the two drumsticks on this plate we counted about sixty maggots. This one was also the grossest to look at, really squishy.

By plate four, which was two weeks old, the two of us doing the work were getting quite used to it. This one had started to dry out a bit. There weren't as many maggots, but there were a couple of the beetles. The beetles are actually predatory. They don't eat the chicken, they feed on the maggots in the chicken.

I actually woke up this morning with a bit of a stuffy nose and was tempted to take an antihistamine. I decided against it in case it made me drowsy. I'm glad I made that decision now as it made it harder for me to smell the rotten meat.

Could I do that sort of thing for a living? To be perfectly honest, if you'd asked me that before today I would have said no. Now I'm not so sure. Although it looked pretty gross, I didn't have a problem with it. Our lecturer said that it's usually the smell that causes people problem rather than the sight of it.

Oh, by the way, yesterday I was dissecting a cockroach, fascinating stuff.