This might be the grossest science experiment I’ve ever written about—which is really saying something on a blog called Gory Details—but it’s also one of the most fascinating. It has to do with the taste a certain type of fly has for human bodily fluids.

Blowflies, in case you’re not familiar with them, are the flies of death. As I learned when rats died in my ceiling, these big shiny flies have an amazing ability to appear seemingly out of nowhere within moments of blood being spilled or at the slightest whiff of decay.

So, a lot of blowflies are sometimes found buzzing around a gory crime scene. That got forensic expert Annalisa Durdle wondering: With all