Which is all to say that while the soil microbial community will change, so too will the animal community above, with as-yet-undetermined effects on plants in the vicinity. Visiting animals may also contribute their urine and feces to the noxious mix. These larvae can appear in such numbers that another group of researchers found they form squirming rivers around pig carcasses left in the forest. Scavengers like vultures might pick at a body, while flies might lay eggs that hatch flesh-eating maggots. Plus, a cadaver attracts a horde of opportunistic critters that further complicate the dynamics at play. But, he adds, “we don't really know what those changes are.”Īlso, it’s still unclear how the gases emanating from a body might affect plants in the area. “The soil microbiome will change and, of course, the plant roots will also sense some changes,” says Stewart. This necrobiome mixes with the microbes in the dirt. The body’s “necrobiome”-all the bacteria that was already in it when it was alive-replicates like crazy in the absence of an immune system. “What we're proposing is to use plants as indicators of human decomposition, to hopefully be able to use individual trees within the forest to help pinpoint where someone has died, to help in body recovery,” says UT Knoxville plant biologist Neal Stewart, coauthor on the new paper.Īs a large mammal like a human decomposes in a forest, its breakdown transforms the soil in a number of ways. The researchers are just beginning to study how a plant’s phenotype-its physical characteristics-might change if a human body is composing nearby. That gave a group of University of Tennessee, Knoxville researchers an idea: What if that blast of nutrients actually changes the color and reflectance of a tree’s leaves? And, if so, what if law enforcement authorities could use a drone to scan a forest, looking for these changes to find deceased missing people? Today in the journal Trends in Plant Science, they’re formally floating the idea-which, to be clear, is still theoretical. Out flows a rank fluid of nutrients, especially nitrogen, for plants on the Body Farm to subsume. That microbial activity leads to bloat, and-eventually-a body will puncture. Known colloquially as the Body Farm, here scientists examine how donated cadavers decay, like how the microbiomes inside us go haywire after death. Since 1980, the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center has plumbed the depths of the most macabre of sciences: the decomposition of human bodies.
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