Today instead of slowing things down we're going to be speeding things up!
Yeah we're going to be timelapsing an animal carcass as it rots down, and if you're squeamish
look away now.
So this is the bad boy that we're decomposing today, a bosc's monitor lizard, or a savannah
monitor.
Very sadly he died of natural causes, but then he got donated to us.
Hopefully with the timelapse we'll be able to see exactly what happens once he starts
decomposing.
Yeah it should be really revealing.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the timelapse, it's a process whereby you
take many still photographs over a long period of time, so you can see something which would
conventionally take a really long time, in a short amount of time.
So we're going to have two cameras for this, one side on, one from the top.
So that was the decomposition of a monitor lizard.
To see how it all began, we need to go back to four and a half weeks ago.
There are about five basic stages of decomposition -- we're going to have to mimic the first.
These are the decomposers we're going to be using.
This was a chicken, but you can see its been absolutely reduced to bones because we've
had it out probably a little bit too long.
You can see it's absolutely chocker with maggots, fly larvae or maggots are fantastic meat eaters,
so we're going to be putting those in first.
Don't vomit through your mask.
We kind of want the initial stages, so between 0-3 days is that initial decay period, so
in here is absolutely shed loads of fly eggs so that's perfect.
We're now going to harvest some of these fly eggs, these little larvae,
There's loads in there.
When these maggots go to work on our lizard, what are they going to be doing?
They're one of the early starters, so they'll be going for the dead meat.
They're known as detritovores which is basically sort of eating dead stuff, and even faecal
matter, poo to you and me.
Cool I reckon we've got enough there.
Let's go back to mr lizard and leave this stinky lot alone.
So I'm just about to make a few incisions on our monitor lizard, to help out those little
fly eggs to go into and under the skin, because that reptile skin is so solid.
Whereabouts are you going to make the incision then?
I think I'm going to start on his belly.
Are you going to put it in a few places or just one.
Yeah I think so, in a few places.
Just about making it through connective tissue there.
First lot of fly eggs going in.
Oo there's thousands of eggs in this one.
A few a bit further up.
So what's going to happen next?
We'll probably see it start to bloat and trigger these fly eggs to get to it.
So the fly eggs are in mate.
He looks ready, and the cameras are ready.
Cool, so let's get it going and we'll be back in a week to see how he's got on.
So it's been a couple of weeks since we were here with the smelly chickens and maggots,
and to be honest I can actually smell the lizard already.
Starting to honk a little bit It seriously is
Let's get in there.
Right here goes.
Oh god yeah.
Oh my god.
That's a wall of smell.
It's changed completely though hasn't it.
The maggots have done a great job just clearing out all the actual tissue, it's just a bag
of skin over those bones.
What would happen in the wild and what we're going to do now is introduce some beetles,
dermestid beetles, also known as larder beetles.
OK.
Time for the beetles and larvae to go on.
They like this stage of dry decay, that's when they come in, when the maggots ship out,
and they should strip any bits of sinew on those bones away.
So, I reckon it's probably going to be another week or two maybe.
Enjoy your dinner lads!
So it's been about four and a half weeks since we put the lizard down.
What do you reckon it's going to look like Si?
Disgusting, but awesome as well.
I can't wait to see it.
Let's give it a go.
It's a bit ripe.
Oh man, oh god.
There are a lot of flies in here.
All of those little maggots turn into pupae which turn into more flies, which leads to
more flies, it's the circle of life, it's one dead lizard for thousands of newborns.
He's got something called beta keratin in his skin.
We don't have that and its so tough you can see it's the only thing remaining and even
the beetles haven't got through it.
So that's kind of interesting in itself, but I would quite like to snip away at that just
leave it with a final skeleton shot.
Yeah I'd like to see what's under that.
Cor that's a great looking skeleton.
So there you have it the decomposition of a monitor lizard, taken over four and a half
weeks.
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