Watch a Pig Decompose Underwater

By Casey Chan on at

Pork is absolutely delicious any which way you cook it, and it seems like sea lice, which are like ocean maggots apparently, would agree too. The sea lice do most of the heavy eating, before shrimp come in to finish the job. It's disturbingly exciting.

Why did scientists throw a dead pig in the ocean? Well, they wanted to get a better idea of how bodies decompose underwater. The experiment, led by forensic scientist Gail Anderson from Simon Fraser University in Canada, shows a pig carcass inside a cage and tracks its entire progress. New Scientist says:


Shrimp come into finish the job but when the scientists retrieved the bones, they were "strangely" jet black for 48 hours. They've never seen that before and are looking at what caused the turn in colour. Watch the video, it ain't pretty. [New Scientist via BoingBoing]