DH+Death's+Acre+HW+2

pg. 98-110

"Maggots are the small, wormlike larvae that hatch from the eggs laid on a body by flies, usually, but not always, the iridescent green insects called blowflies. When maggots first hatch, they're smaller than grains of rice; by the time they mature, they're roughly as long and fat as pieces of macaroni. They get that big by feasting on decaying flesh. in Tennessee they do, anyhow in Kansas not so much."

"Flies, though, are relentless and almost infinite in number. Lay a fresh, bloody body out of the ground on a summer day, and within minutes the air will be thick with swarming blowflies. Swing a shovel like a giant flyswatter and you can probably knock down a few on the wing, but in the time it would take to do that, dozens of reinforcements will arrive"

"How does a corpse alter the environment in the small ecosystem where it decays? ...over a one-year period Reed set out 45 carcasses of dogs that had been euthanized by the local pound. He set one out every two weeks during hot weather; during cooler spells he lengthened that interval. ...Not surprisingly, he found that the total number of insects on, in, and around the carcasses was greatest during the summer; however, several individual species experienced their population peaks during cooler weather."

"The warm-weather bodies...began attracting blowflies by the hundreds within a matter of minutes. Blood triggered a feeding frenzy like nothing he could have imagined: Sitting just a food or two away from a bloody body, Bill would soon find even himself overrun with flies, seeking any moist bodily fluids to feed on, any dar, damp orifices to lay their eggs in. He quickly learned to wrap netting around his head to keep the flies out of his eyes, nose, mouth and ears."

"As the maggot population exploded, Bill noticed carrion beetles arriving to feed not just on the carrion but on the maggots as well. LIke a wasp beheading a fly, a beetle would clamp its powerful jaws on a wrigling victim and cut it cleanly in two. Bill described some of these life-and-death struggles for me in epic terms..."

"Bill and I were speculating about how far away the flies could smell the bodies, and whether the same flies were coming back day after day to feed on them. That's when we got the idea of marking the flies with orange paint and trying to track them. ...When we took the marked flies outside and released them, they took off, seeming at random. The next day at the Body Farm though, Bill netted three of the 5 marked flies."

They tried to figure out how a Lisa Rinker had been killed. They found her body on the side of the road, mostly decomposed. They couldn't tell from the autopsy how she had died, so they boiled her body parts to remove the flesh. The bones showed that she had in fact been stabbed because there were serration marks on the bones.