Dead Pigs Used To Investigate Ocean's "Dead Zones" 106
timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."
Waste not, want not. (Score:3, Funny)
What a waste.
I was going to suggest a slashdot poll for this but there are only two realistic choices. Which makes more sense?
A) The current "Sink them to the depths of the ocean where they are eaten by sea critters for science"
B) Put them in my secret basement room where I could don a pig-head skin mask and have dry anal sex with their corpses while listening to opera.
.
Re:Waste not, want not. (Score:5, Funny)
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FTFY
Re:Waste not, want not. (Score:4, Funny)
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You forgot the "Golden Arches" option (Score:2)
C) 100% Canadian Bacon.
After all, Dirty Fat Bastard wants some baby back baby back baby back baby back baby back baby back ribs!
No research in a vacuum (Score:1)
Change from the original plan (Score:5, Funny)
They were going to use dead puppies, until they found out they're not much fun.
Re:Change from the original plan (Score:5, Funny)
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If "screwing with the '101 Uses for a Dead Cat' publishing lobby" isn't on the original list, they've got a problem.
- RG>
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And they don't chase squirrels at all.
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Have you tried donating him to Canada ?
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they were going to use dead puppies, but then they got intelligence that Atlantians may be Muslim.
PETA tried it with kittens (Score:2)
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That's:
http://www.peta.org/sea_kittens [peta.org]
but thedevils has funny pictures.
As Patrick Laffey (RIP) used to say, "You can't MAKE this shit up."
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Much more efficient. (Score:2, Funny)
This sounds like a much better idea than when they studied the Dead Zone in the 80s using Christopher Walken. Dead bloated pig corpses are more plentiful, not to mention way less creepy.
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Not until you see "2020: The year the mutant zombie pigs attacked"
Bacon (Score:2, Funny)
As long as it doesn't effect the price of bacon. (Score:2, Informative)
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Of course it won't effect the price of bacon.
Neither will it affect the price of bacon.
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"effect" as a noun, refers to a consequence or result. As a verb, it means the same thing as "implement", roughly.
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If everything else is equal you are correct, but not if enough people are long in long pork, or if more people express a longing for long pork. If you remember the Atkins fad, you will know that pork is not immune to speculative bubbles, especially in the rind sector.
Screw that (Score:5, Funny)
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Do you have any idea how many Bacon Double Cheeseburgers you can get out of a single pig and cow? You would throw all that deliciousness away just to get a 40-page article in Forensic Science Quarterly that comes to the final conclusion "They sink"?
No kidding. Why not, instead of using tasty pigs, round up a bunch of Tea Party members, anyone who thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be president and everyone at Fox News, shoot them in the head and use their corpses for the testing. We'd not only end up with more tasty bacon but we'd also be improving the collective IQ of humanity by doing so, and accomplishing valuable science. It's all upside.
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Re:Screw that (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference in a trillion dollars spent on war, and the 700 billion "spent" in TARP loans, is that loans can get repaid:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126015764384079549.html [wsj.com]
Whether or not Bush should have invaded Iraq, and whether or not Obama should have tried to stabilize the financial system are separate issues. Just saying that the spending involved is of a different nature.
Re:Screw that (Score:5, Insightful)
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Where'd you hear that Obama added 5 trillion dollars to the national debt last year? You've been lied to. I'd guess by Rush Limbaugh, since he's been saying this for weeks, but no doubt a lot of lesser professional liars are repeating it.
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It's a misquote of Karl Rove(although the original quote was worded to be misleading in this way anyway). He's mixing up debt and deficit.
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Limbaugh's lie goes like this: newspaper says The national debt reached 11 Trillion last year. That's last year, not the 2001-2008, but 2009. It's Obama's debt!
Of course, The debt was already around 5 Trillion in 2001 and was nearly 10 Trillion by 2009, but Limbaugh thinks his listeners don't know that.
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Their funding for doing the project was enough for 3 pigs. They sent 2 into the ocean.
Mmmm.. Thinly sliced and fried pork bellies.
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i think they use pigs "marked" not fit for human consumption in these kind of things
(do you think that a slaughterhouse is going to sell/give a useable carcass??
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Aesthetics (Score:1)
I know one person eager to hear the results. (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly the Wrong Serial Killer. (Score:2)
Oh, come on, man, everyone knows Dexter uses human bodies to dump at sea.
It's dead pigs, for Goodness' sake! How does that not just scream "Jigsaw" to you, or at least that pig farmer Frank Black fought on "Millenium?" :-)
I need to get out more.
So . . . (Score:1)
Curiosity? Reason? (Score:1, Interesting)
What are the reasons for better understanding corpse decomposition in the oceans?
It sounds like this may be a study to figure
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Pigs have, so far as I understand, been used for all sorts of science where using humans is not practical or ethical. For instance, if I recall correctly, various pig organs can and are used for human organ transplants. So sure, using pigs for this sort of thing makes sense. However, I do have a question.
Don't forget the Mythbusters. They have frequently used pigs as human analogs.
instead of pigs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Pigs are really useful, for example, as a seperator between a beef patty and lettuce. Why not use something that's completely useless, like politicions?
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Politicions? What are they, like the political wing of the Decepticons?
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How about something not only completely useless, but harmful, like bankers?
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Corrected link (Score:2)
The proper website for the (in)famous body farm is: University of Tennessee: Forensic Anthropology Center [utk.edu].
Marine Science, not forensics research (Score:5, Informative)
Surprisingly, (sarcasm) the summary is misleading. From reading the article, the research is about finding out about marine scavengers in low oxygen ocean environments, and how low of a concentration of oxygen they will tolerate in order to feed.
"So Professor Tunnicliffe and her team set out to find out "how low marine scavengers would go", in terms of oxygen, for a free lunch."
It has nothing to do with dead humans sinking or floating or decomposing. The pigs were a convenient bait that they tethered to the ocean floor in specific areas of specific oxygen concentrations.
They learned that the scavengers would spend days in a 7% oxygen environment, which was previously thought to be uninhabitable, but if the bait was placed in an even lower oxygen area, it was left alone by everything except bacteria.
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It has nothing to do with dead humans sinking or floating or decomposing
If you read closely, it states that they piggybacked their research onto a another team that was doing exactly that.
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Anyway, the burn smelled like bacon... somewhat disturbing, and yet, it made me a little hungry.
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Can't remember where though.
Zombie pigs... (Score:1, Funny)
Grains....GRAINS!
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What a waste of good pork! (Score:3, Funny)
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For some reason, they float rather than drown...
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Dead pigs are useful to study scavengers because . (Score:3, Funny)
There, fixed it.
Human flesh isn't called "long pig" or "the other other white meat" for nothing.
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Human flesh isn't called "long pig" or "the other other white meat" for nothing.
[citation needed]
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That's why they're dead now (Score:2)
Simpler way (Score:2)
Why bother with the pigs? Just outsource it to China. I bet it's going to be cheaper as well!
BBC rocks, hard. (Score:1)
Why not use lawyers? (Score:1)
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The idea of the study was to see what undersea scavengers would do in a low oxygen environment. If you sunk a group of lawyers in a dead zone, then you'd have scavengers chasing scavengers in an anaerobic wasteland. This would simply replicate a typical day on Capital Hill. No need to waste any more tax money on that.