G.S ANDERSON, L.S. BELL, PLOS ONE, 11:E0149107, 2016.
When forensic entomologist Gail Anderson gave talks to police officers about what insects can do to dead bodies, inevitably somebody would ask her what happens to bodies dumped in the ocean. But with almost no work done on human decomposition in marine environments, “I couldn’t give them an answer,” the Simon Fraser University researcher says.
Around 2000, Robert Teather, a decorated officer in British Columbia’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and founder of its Underwater Recovery Team, asked Anderson why she didn’t take matters into her own hands and do some marine studies herself. The answer, she told him, was simply a matter of resources. “I said, ‘I’d love to, but you’d need boats, and you’d need divers,’” she recalls. “And he said, ‘Gail, we ...
