On the Beach: From Far and Wide

Plough snails are exceptionally well adapted to detecting dead creatures the tide has deposited on the beach for them and other scavengers to feed on.

See them at work in this excellent video.

At a young age, I developed an interest in dying, death and decay. In Ecclesiastes, which is one of my favourite books in the Old Testicle (ha ha), along with Job and Jonah, there is an assessment of the life cycle which strikes me as pretty accurate.

I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.  

For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. 

All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.

Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?
So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

About 20 years ago my interest in the decomposition process was reawakened and I did some research in order to write a fictional piece about a forensic entomologist. The story is set on a smallholding in Rhodesia in the late 1950s. In this extract, the protagonist’s wife has just committed suicide.

After finding her he spent the night sitting in the front room, the pressure lamp burning, the curtains undrawn. When the sun rose he went to the outbuilding and pushed open the big door. It swung halfway and scraped to a halt on the concrete floor. She was still hanging there. How could it be otherwise? The air stirred and a swirl of dust moved in, faltered and lay still. He entered and a rat scurried for cover behind the rusting hammer mill. She had attached the rope to the tie beam of the central truss, the stepladder lay on its side. The short drop had not been sufficient to break her neck; instead it was the slip noose that had strangled her. Her canvass takkies pointed downward as if saying, Look, only nine inches to go. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her arms dangled loosely. With the back of his fingers he felt her cold flesh and she gave an inch and swung back; half an inch and back. 

For most of the day, he sat on the veranda looking out through the mosquito wire, thinking of her hanging from the beam. As the hours passed anxiety began to build in him. He had to do something. Already it was going to be difficult explaining why he had not reported this last night. They had been so innocent and yet their lives had been ruined so quickly. Unreality surrounded him and he felt utterly alone in an empty, forsaken world. Yet the idea had begun to form and the conviction was growing as his nervousness increased. He had to do something and it had to be something that could at least partially justify or atone for this squandering of her life. She had been a scientist and an agnostic, unsentimental and fundamentally utilitarian. She would have approved.

It was easier to undress her where she hung. When she was stripped he positioned the ladder behind her and, with considerable difficulty, loosened the rope and took her down. Out in the hot sun, he walked the hundred yards to the run and was sweating and out of breath when he lowered her to the ground. Bent double he backed in, dragging her after him, his hands in her armpits. In the middle of the empty chicken run she lay full length on her back amidst the dried-out weeds whilst he opened her abdominal cavity with a deep longitudinal incision from sternum to below the umbilicus. Then he turned her over, positioning her left arm behind her and her right arm crooked upward. Gently he prised open her jaws. 

"As I stood up, I was gratified to notice the arrival of the first blow flies, whose green metallic glint meant they were of the Lucidiae genus. I closed the gate and went back to the house for my notebook and bush hat."

He spent seven months observing the decomposition of his wife and collecting the data upon which his career as forensic entomologist was to be built. In due course he discovered she was to be visited by a succession of four categories of insect. The first was that comprising the primary bio degraders whose purpose it was to recycle the bulk of organic matter. The second category consisted of parasites and predators that fed on the larvae of the first category. The third category specialised in the consumption of exudates, while the fourth category performed no function at all, merely looking and then moving on. The blow flies were by far the most industrious and brought about rapid change in the early stages. Ants assisted the flies by day, eating through the epidermis and causing lesions that could be used by the flies to gain access to the body. By night the smaller rodents assisted by gnawing the flesh from the extremities, thus providing further access. The family of hide-and-skin beetles known as Dermistidae took over from the flies when Mrs Witherspoon began to dry out.

“Finally came the Trox beetles, family Trogidae. If one can ever say finally. The process goes on, to dust and beyond. But certainly the last horde of bulk degraders arrived in the form of the Trox beetles, which specialised in the recycling of hair. It was time to conclude the field study. The notes I packed in a suitcase and my specimens, hundreds of them, all labelled, I placed in trunks. This was my magnum opus. As for Gladys, I gathered together what was left of her, coaxed the old hammer mill into life, and kibbled her into a coarse meal to be dispersed in the open veld."

I wonder if plough snails would go to work on a corpse if it was washed up? I suspect they would if the body was already decomposing and lying below the high water mark.

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