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

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.

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

[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: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.

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.