#7 - The lamb - 5/30/25

I started with just the frozen carcass, which I then had to thaw. First, my teacher suggested we use a microwave to thaw it, but after five minutes or so, we decided to just thaw it with hot water (shown in Fig. 1).

After a few rounds of the hot water bath, I then took the lamb into the woods (to the same location as the calf) while carrying it in a plastic bag.

The lamb was so incredibly light, and this allowed for a much different experience than lugging the calf down into the hilly woods in an oversized wheelbarrow. The whole ordeal of setting up the cage went fairly quickly, given that I just placed the lamb on top of the calf's remains (as my study is more observational, my teacher said that it didn't require as much precision).

Next, once the lamb was in the cage, I took a scalpel and added a laceration to the calf's side, to hopefully speed up the process of decomposition.

I noticed that with the calf, the maggots seemed to spring into action once they had access to the insides of the carcass's body. I hope this will help to speed up the process, as well as just show me what insect interaction with wounds looks like!

In fig. 3, you can see the state of the wound after a week. The bugs that were on the calf's bones are now covering the eyes, mouth, and wound of the lamb.

I believe these are sowbugs, which are actually isopods, not true bugs!

I didn't know they ate animal remains, and after doing a bit of surface-level digging, it looks like they primarily eat rotting plants and wood, though they can consume animal remains to get nutrition when the environment is lacking their normal food sources.