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It takes 9 DAYS for desert scavengers to eat you alive (transcript) | NPR
How an idea that "bodies in the desert don't decompose until, you know, six to 9 months in" was debunked, dawg:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bo...3-what-remains
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/bo...rt-2-hold-line
Transcript:
LN (Latif Nasser): Oh and this, Oh what?! What is- what are those hairs?
BA: That’s-that’s dried muscle. ...the closest I can, the closest thing I can say is uh the muscle dries out so it gets stringy and shredded.
LN: Ok wait wait, let’s, actually let’s just start from the beginning. Ok so, so we are in what-what room was this again?
BA: We’re in the special procedures room... ...of the Pema County Office of The Medical Examiner. And what we’re looking at here is a case of mostly skeletal remains.
LN: So we have a, we have a skull, we have a few, we have some parts of the...
BA: The spine.
LN: ...The spine it looks like, and then just two...
BA: And all three, all three major bones of the lower limbs. So the two thigh bones, the femurs, and the two tibias and the two uh fibulae. We kn- we know it’s the male. He’s an adult......20 to 30 to 40-year-old uh uh uh migrant. He came in (Music IN) late January or early February, and uh animals found him. Maybe fifty percent of his skeleton is missing. His upper limbs and his pelvis and most of his spine are missing, and his hands and feet are missing. We have evidence here that a vulture was feeding -- was feeding on the person.
LN: I s, I-I don’t know if this is...
BA:: That’s a beetle. That’s a domestic beetle. That’s called a hide beetle. They’re-they’re found globally... ...and these hide beetles specialize in, in, in eating dried, hard tissue.
LN: So he’s still, he’s still eating? Yeah...
BA: Yeah, he is.
LN: Wow.
BA: He was in the body bag. He and his colony would have been on the body [...] In the body bag, and uh although we try to get them most of them off during our exam, you can see there’s lots of little crevices where a single bug could, could be.
JDL: So we had been about two weeks into the pig experiment and...
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LN: This is a series of experiments where Jason and his team, mostly students uh looked at how pigs decomposed in the desert, in order to understand how people decompose in the desert.
3
KH: Kate Hall and I’m a physical anthropologist.
JA (Jad Abumrad): what’s a physical anthropologist?
KH: Uhm, a physical anthropologist is someone who studies, they study human bones and they try and infer what someone’s life and death was like from skeletal remains. And, Jason pretty much came up to me and told me that he’d been thinking about getting some pigs...
JD (Jason De León): Pigs have long been the common proxy for human bodies you know for crime scene stuff like, uhm, they would they shoot them, they bury them, and they you know and they use them for these different sort of, um decomposition experiments.
KH: We got shoes and socks.
LN: Dressed their pigs...
JD: bra, panties...
KH: jeans, t-shirts...
LN: In clothes that migrants would wear because they wanted to recreate the conditions exactly, and then they took these dressed dead pigs out into the desert.
KH: Arivaca, Arizona. And it’s like another planet. It’s like nowhere else I have ever been on Earth. Um, it’s hot, and saying it’s hot doesn’t really do it justice.
LN: It was like 115/120 degrees Fahrenheit.
KH: so...
LN: Jason and the research team get together.
KH: in this big field and we had one, one pig under a tree, in light shade. We were trying to replicate like if someone was tired and needed to take a rest somewhere.
LN: And for the second pig Jason had heard...
KH: From anecdotes from migrants...
JD: Stories about people dying in their groups, and they would say, well we didn't want to leave this person behind but we had to cuz they were dead.
LN: So they would cover their body with rocks...
JD: In hopes of protecting them from animals...
LN: So they placed these two pigs, one in the shade, one under rocks in the sun, and they set up a series of motion-sensing cameras all around the perimeter of the area to watch both pigs. These are the kinds of cameras that turn on if something moves.
LN: And then, they waited. And remember, based on what Jason had read, the prevailing idea was that bodies in the desert don’t decompose until, you know, six months in...
KH: To around 9 months in.
[...]
LN: Later that night camera comes on again. It’s night vision. Um, you can see the pig, again… and then...
LN: You see this vulture, a few feet away from the pig.
KH: After a couple of hours...
[SOUNDS OF VULTURES EATING]
LN: Camera comes back on and now there are eight vultures on top of this pig.
KH: Pecking and...
LN: Tearing. A few hours later...
KH: They-they go in. They make a hole in the back of the neck, uhm kind of like, kind of right behind the ear. And they’re trying to get at the brain. And then...
KH: They pull off the shirt. They eventually rip the jeans off.
LN: By noon of the fifth day there are hoards of vultures.
KH: You see them attack the abdomen and rip open the stomach and then you see intestines being pulled out and then you have two vultures come in front of the camera and they’re playing tug of war with these intestines and… They start to take apart the limbs. They’ll actually like carry them away. They will carry limbs as like convenient packages of meat that they can eat later.
LN: On day seven.
KH: They dragged what was left of the body about 20 meters up a hill and within 9 days, they had picked it, picked it clean.
RK: So they thought it might take 9 months and now it’s down to 9 days?
LN: Mhm, and-and that was the pig in the shade. The pig in the little rock hut? That pig went way faster.
JD: Yeah. That was within 24 hours vultures had started feeding and just got in underneath the rocks and ripped it up because we had really forgotten that-that rocks conduct heat. So it literally cooked the body and speeds up this process.
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KH: It completely defied expectations. This wasn’t what we were expecting at all.
KH: I had never seen this before. Like, we’re used to flies and some beetles, but...
JD: We have footage of ants
KH: Ants!
JD: Consuming parts of long bones.
KH: They’re chipping off pieces of bone and carrying them off to this ant hole a meter
JD: That was really shocking and it kind of hinted at the fact that you leave someone out there for, for long enough and they’ll, and they will completely disappear.
KH: This is an environment um in which people can become really easily just---
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