blowfly postscript

For those who cannot never hear too many gross biology stories:

Maggots usually move away from the corpse into a somewhat drier area, and for them "drier" usually means "up." But moving up is not always a successful strategy. Once while working a very wet habitat, my students and I arrived early in the morning to find that maggots were leaving our dead pigs [proxies for human bodies] in search of a drier place to pupate. There was no dry area for several miles, but maggots have limited perceptions. They climbed trees. They crawled up the trunk, moved along the branches to their tips, and then fell back to the ground. Since there were three pigs in the area, each with thousands of maggots leaving to climb trees and eventually fall back down, it was quite literally raining maggots. The deluge was so bad that we had to return to the laboratory for umbrellas so that we could finish our sampling.

~ care of M. Lee Goff
A Fly for the Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes