Dead Pigs Used To Investigate Ocean's "Dead Zones"

timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."

Comments

Waste not, want not.

[grub]

What a waste.

I was going to suggest a slashdot poll for this but there are only two realistic choices. Which makes more sense?

A) The current "Sink them to the depths of the ocean where they are eaten by sea critters for science"

B) Put them in my secret basement room where I could don a pig-head skin mask and have dry anal sex with their corpses while listening to opera.

.

Re:Waste not, want not.

[eln]

Note to self: Stay out of grub's basement.

Re:Waste not, want not.

[greyline]

You should listen to "Goodbye Horses" instead of opera.

Change from the original plan

[Chris Mattern]

They were going to use dead puppies, until they found out they're not much fun.

Re:Change from the original plan

[zepo1a]

I heard they were going to use dead cats, but the "101 Uses for a Dead Cat" publishing lobby vetoed that idea as changing the title of the book series to 102 would be too costly.

Bacon

[josteos]

Tastes awesome AND is great for fishing, crabbing, shrimping, sea starring, sharking, ...

As long as it doesn't effect the price of bacon.

[newdsfornerds]

Pigs will kill and eat people too you know. Not just feral pigs either.

Screw that

[elrous0]

Do you have any idea how many Bacon Double Cheeseburgers you can get out of a single pig and cow? You would throw all that deliciousness away just to get a 40-page article in Forensic Science Quarterly that comes to the final conclusion "They sink"?

Re:Screw that

[multiplexo]

Do you have any idea how many Bacon Double Cheeseburgers you can get out of a single pig and cow? You would throw all that deliciousness away just to get a 40-page article in Forensic Science Quarterly that comes to the final conclusion "They sink"?

No kidding. Why not, instead of using tasty pigs, round up a bunch of Tea Party members, anyone who thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be president and everyone at Fox News, shoot them in the head and use their corpses for the testing. We'd not only end up with more tasty bacon but we'd also be improving the collective IQ of humanity by doing so, and accomplishing valuable science. It's all upside.

Re:Screw that

[elrous0]

Now, now, settle down. Besides, I'm pretty sure that shooting any of those particular people in the head wouldn't really hurt them.

Re:Screw that

[Kelbear]

The difference in a trillion dollars spent on war, and the 700 billion "spent" in TARP loans, is that loans can get repaid:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126015764384079549.html

Whether or not Bush should have invaded Iraq, and whether or not Obama should have tried to stabilize the financial system are separate issues. Just saying that the spending involved is of a different nature.

Re:Screw that

[Attila Dimedici]

So the difference between Iraq (Bush) and TARP (also Bush) has what to do with Obama spending more in the first year than Bush did in 8?

Re:Screw that

[Boronx]

Where'd you hear that Obama added 5 trillion dollars to the national debt last year? You've been lied to. I'd guess by Rush Limbaugh, since he's been saying this for weeks, but no doubt a lot of lesser professional liars are repeating it.

I know one person eager to hear the results.

[SOdhner]

He's a blood spatter expert for Miami PD. He seems really, really interested in what they find. I wonder why?

instead of pigs...

[SnarfQuest]

Pigs are really useful, for example, as a seperator between a beef patty and lettuce. Why not use something that's completely useless, like politicions?

Marine Science, not forensics research

[Somegeek]

Surprisingly, (sarcasm) the summary is misleading. From reading the article, the research is about finding out about marine scavengers in low oxygen ocean environments, and how low of a concentration of oxygen they will tolerate in order to feed.

"So Professor Tunnicliffe and her team set out to find out "how low marine scavengers would go", in terms of oxygen, for a free lunch."

It has nothing to do with dead humans sinking or floating or decomposing. The pigs were a convenient bait that they tethered to the ocean floor in specific areas of specific oxygen concentrations.

They learned that the scavengers would spend days in a 7% oxygen environment, which was previously thought to be uninhabitable, but if the bait was placed in an even lower oxygen area, it was left alone by everything except bacteria.

Re:Marine Science, not forensics research

[yasmar]

The reference to the Atlantic Ocean is also off the mark. The study occurred on Canada's west coast.

What a waste of good pork!

[Locke2005]

Why not simply use lawyers?

Dead pigs are useful to study scavengers because .

[tomhudson]

"This big hunk of meat on the seafloor represented a good food source for these marine creatures," she says.

"Scavengers are very important in the world. They're what allow things to restore."

The pigs are used by forensics researchers because - strange as it might seem - we humans are remarkably pig-like in our anatomy. We share their relatively hairless skin, are similar in size, and our flesh has a similar make-up and TASTE.

There, fixed it.

Human flesh isn't called "long pig" or "the other other white meat" for nothing.