The Fire-Circle Tantra

Since about my freshman year of high school I’ve been into taxidermy and vulture culture. It’s a long story and lots have happened with that since, but I love what I did and I do now, it’s great 👍

Anyway, one of the processes used to clean animal bones and skulls is called maceration (the process of using naturally occurring microorganisms to decompose soft tissues). Essentially, you put skinned animal bones in a bucket full of water (warm, preferably) let it rot for a week, dump dirty water out and fill up again and rinse and repeat until you have clean bone! Then you move onto degreasing and whitening with hydrogen peroxide, but that’s not what my research is about.

It’s a straightforward method if you know what you’re doing, but a lot of weird things can happen during maceration if you leave the bucket too long or if the bones you find are from certain environments (carrying bacteria that can cause weird things). One of these things is causing a black or red biofilm to grow on the bone and on the water. Not much is known about it what bacteria causes this except that it’s anaerobic, meaning it grows in oxygen free conditions.

The research lab I’m in already works with microbes, and about a year and a half ago asked my PI if I could set up a research project to investigate what the hell was going on to cause these bacteria to grow and to identify what bacteria species they actually are (because formal literature has NOTHING on maceration in terms of looking at it from a taxidermy or vulture culture point of view). Luckily my university is well funded and I was able to get a grant to carry out this research last summer. For my experiment, I used 6 skinned coyote heads from a trapper out west (originally wanted to use whitetail deer, but regulations with deer hunting made those a tad harder to get).

Long story short, this is what I ended up doing (I’m copying and pasting my methods here I don’t feel like retyping it 💀)

“Animal biomass was incubated under oxic (weekly water changes) and anoxic (stagnant) conditions under warm temperatures. Samples were collected weekly for microbial sequencing (16S/18S rRNA), enzyme activity assays, and physicochemical measurements (pH, DO, TOC, temperature). Statistical analyses compare microbial succession, enzymatic activity, and carbon release across treatments.”

(This was the setup, illustration by lil ol me)

(some of less gory pictures I have of when I sampled)

The oxic versus anoxic conditions was to test if this bacteria was actually anaerobic. Ended up not figuring that out because the biofilm did not form! (🥀) However, I was able to steer my research into a direction to just investigate microbial succession in maceration conditions (since no one had done that yet, we love research gaps)

I have figure after figure of my results but since nothings officially published, feel free to DM if you want to ask about any specific results, I’d be more than happy to share.