Jan. 12, 2007
News Coverage
More Photos: Art in Action ~ Maggot Art Show
Maggot Art Appreciation
Entomologist helps fly larvae create unique paintings -- and recruits kids to help
Sacramento Bee, The (CA)
January 28, 2007
Author: Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
Bee Staff Writer
A maggot couldn't ask for a better friend than Rebecca O'Flaherty. She helps kids appreciate the larval stage of flies, teaching children how to dip maggots into nontoxic paint and set them on paper to writhe away, creating "maggot art."
She teaches law enforcement officers how to recognize, collect and preserve maggots and other insect evidence that can help establish time of death.
And she's devoted years of her life to studying maggot habits, working toward a doctorate in entomology at UC Davis.
O'Flaherty wants people to better understand the insects that tidy up the world's oozing messes.
"We'd be knee-deep in garbage ... if we didn't have them to clean it up," she said.
Maggot art is the hook, and it's a grabber. A piece of O'Flaherty's art has been part of the scenery on "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," hanging on the office wall of fictional TV investigator Gil Grissom. In Sacramento, O'Flaherty and two friends just opened a maggot art exhibit at the Capital Athletic Club, where their work's squiggling, swooping lines decorate a hallway gallery that leads to the swimming pool.
Beyond the art are more serious goals: Help forensic entomology shed its academic image of too much flash, too little substance. Help answer some of the questions that are vitally important to detective work, such as how temperature affects maggot growth.
O'Flaherty, a lean redhead with a quick smile, probably wouldn't be an entomologist at all if it weren't for seasickness. Forced to give up on marine biology, she switched to freshwater ecosystems.
A job surveying the remains of salmon after they'd spawned made it clear that for O'Flaherty, the swiftness and elegance of their decay was more compelling than the fish themselves. And you cannot understand decay without coming to know maggots .
The maggot is an engine of destruction. For a short week or so in a fly's 1-month to 2-month life, the maggot is little more than mouth, gut and muscle, eating and growing until it forms the cocoon-like shell from which it will emerge as a fly.
In their brief larval stage, they clump together to feed with astonishing voracity.
"They can reduce a 50-pound carcass to skin and bones in four to five days in the summer," said O'Flaherty, who set out a dead pig to prove it.
For all their ubiquity, though, we know relatively little about maggot biology, behavior and development. Maggots clump together in a heat-generating mass when they feed, but there is "only conjecture" about how that heat interacts with air temperature to affect their growth, O'Flaherty said. And yet, insect growth is among the key factors experts rely on to determine a time of death.
That has led to conflicting testimony in court cases, with no consensus among experts on what their margin of error should be.
So university scientists are dubious about forensic entomology -- along with lots of other forensic sciences, said UC Davis entomology professor Robert Kimsey.
While the field is fighting back with more rigorous research and more care about what's said in court, Kimsey said, "If you're going to go to a major, top-flight university, you probably don't want to advertise yourself as a specialist in forensics."
O'Flaherty plans to downplay her own interest when she begins the brutally competitive hunt for a teaching post.
"They don't consider it to be real science," she said.
It is, though, a great draw -- for college courses, museums and just about anyone hoping to interest people in bugs. The way O'Flaherty figures it, somehow the dark pull of death overrides maggots ' major image problems.
"They writhe around, and they're slimy," O'Flaherty said of the larval stage of the insect she's devoted long research hours to since 2000, through four moves, a divorce, and the vague smell of rotting meat that clings to her clothes after she leaves the lab.
She, like other entomologists, is struck that people are far more repelled by relatively harmless maggots than by mosquitoes, an insect whose disease-laden bite can kill.
One reason may be the juiciness factor. Something squishy like a maggot is more revolting than something drier, like an adult fly, said Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies disgust.
In Western cultures, maggots rank high on the scale of disgusting things, he said, yet it's clear that our revulsion is learned, not instinctive.
"One reason we know this is little kids eat all this stuff," Rozin said.
O'Flaherty notices that up through about second grade, kids approaching a maggot art project don't struggle with the "ewwww" factor that can make some older youngsters and adults balk.
Just about everyone warms to maggot art in time, though, from law officers to grade school kids to O'Flaherty's friends.
She's been helping teachers get students involved in maggot art for about six years, since she and fellow entomology club members dreamed it up during a brainstorming session when she was studying in Hawaii.
They might be originators of the concept, but they're not certain.
A few days ago, amid the buzz over the opening of her Sacramento show, O'Flaherty heard from a kindred spirit in Vacaville.
She'd been painting with snails for years.
The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg can be reached at (916) 321-1086 or cpeytondahlberg@sacbee.com.
Maggot Miscellany
Rebecca O'Flaherty's top-10 list of cool things to know about maggots:
1. They eat stuff we'd rather not have around, like rotting plants and animals.
2. Even today, doctors use them to clean wounds.
3. They help solve crimes.
4. One word: Bait.
5. They climb vertical surfaces without arms or legs.
6. They find their way to food without any eyes.
7. Some coil themselves like a spring and leap.
8. They work together to survive.
9. They create their own heat.
10. They make beautiful art. |
More examples of "maggot art " and a video of Rebecca O'Flaherty in her studio can be seen at http://www.sacbee.com/links.
Contact:
Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications
UC Mosquito Research Program
Department of Entomology
396 Briggs Hall
University of California, Davis
Davis, CA 95616
Phone: (530) 754-6894
E-mail: kegarvey@ucdavis.edu
