Day 20 - Lots of maggots!!!

(posted by Stinkographer 1)

I skipped merrily towards the meat today, giddily anticipating my first glimpse of the maggots.

My heart sank when I first viewed the meat. The smell did not disappoint--it was indeed as bad as Stinkographer 2 had described it. However, I had expected by now there would be plenty of maggots crawling in plain sight. Frustrated, I looked around and found a suitable stick. I was determined. I wanted to see maggots, and lots of them.

I knew things were about to get ugly, but I never saw this coming...

Wow. I repeat: Wow. Maggot central! I had no idea how many were actually living under there! Flipping the chicken exposed literally hundreds of them! Truly an incredible sight--and sound! The countless maggots crawling through the hen's belly made a very audible noise, one that I can only compare to the sound you hear when mixing tuna fish and mayonnaise together (you're going to remember this the next time you order tuna salad).

I held the game hen in place for a good minute to snap photos. During this time, the majority of maggots took shelter in the vast labyrinth of tunnels they had carved through the chicken's flesh. For a while, my sheer sense of joy at the sight of maggots helped me to ignore the horrendous stench I had released by exposing their living quarters. However, the longer the hen's underside was exposed to the outside air, the worse the smell became. The gentle outside breeze no longer helped. When the stench reached a 9.5 on our 1-10 scale, I was forced to momentarily abandon the meat. It was at this point that I decided to leave the hen right-side-up for the remainder of my observations.

Not surprisingly, the ground beef appears to have suffered a similar fate. The maggots are everywhere!

Even the plastic around the giblet sack appears to be a suitable home for the maggots. It's interesting... ants may be able to ward off any and all competition, but maggots appear to be capable of thriving in an increasingly hostile environment. Even one that the ants have declared no-mans-land.

To quote our anonymous friend from day 15, "I cannot imagine this experiment getting any more wonderful, and yet, I know it will."

Continue to Day 21