Summary

In Chapter 8, it was in 1981 that an Anthropology department teaching assistant named Bill Rodriguez began studying flies and the way they interact with dead bodies. Bass explains that maggots are larvae hatched from eggs laid on human bodies by blowflies. These flies are attracted to the moist openings of the body, like the nose and eyes, as well as bloody wounds. Bass noted he had determined when working in the Great Plains that when he found pupal casings with an Indian skeleton it meant that the Indian had died in the summer. That was because flies did not move about in the winter. As part of Bill’s experiment chronicling insect activity on human corpses, he marked five flies to track them. Bass notes that three of those flies Bill collected from the Body Farm were back at the farm a day later...