Wow, That's A Lot Of Maggots (TMI, Not For Lunchtime Reading)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I learned a lesson this week: they pick up the garbage twice a week around here for a reason.

You see, due to some anomaly, we generated very little trash the last two weeks. Four garbage days came and went, each time with me thinking “Meh…there’s hardly anything in the garbage bin. I’ll put it out by the street next time.”

Now, “very little” trash doesn’t mean “no trash”. And there was one bag in the garbage can that it seems I had forgotten about. You see, about two weeks ago, I decide to clean out the fridge. I pull out the unidentifiable, fuzzy things that’ve sat way in the back of the fridge for so long that they’re probably working up escape plans of their own. Pinch nose, toss in trash bag, toss bag in outside garbage pail. Then wait. Two weeks. With old, rotting meat products in the bottom of the garbage.

Two days ago, I walked past the trash can, and noticed a maggot on the lid. “Huh…”, I thought, “…that’s an odd place for a single maggot to be hanging out. Oh yeah, that reminds me…I gotta get this can out tomorrow night for garbage collection Thursday morning”.

Last night I empty the wastebaskets around the house, bag up the trash, and take it down to the garbage can. I lift the lid, and freeze. Ho. Lee. Crap. Maggots. Billions of 'em. Swarming, teeming, wrestling, dropping out of the can all over the driveway. I look down my feet, and realize I’m standing on a living carpet.

I toss the bag in the can and jump out of the fray. They’re not spiders, meaning my ick-factor is pretty low for these guys, so I take some time to study them. I notice that there is a long line of them stretching down the driveway. I crouch down for a closer look, and realize that they’re not making this trip willingly – a nest of ants has realized that a feast was on, and were carrying their wriggly morsels back to their queen.

I gingerly stepped around the fray and dragged the can down to the curb, spewing bucketloads of maggots the entire way. I thought about just getting the hose and washing them all away, but figured they’d all meet one end or the other by morning.

I peeked out my window this morning when the garbage truck approached – I felt really bad about what the garbage man was about to discover. I guess it’s nothing out of the ordinary, though. He didn’t bat an eye…just dumped the trash and moved on. The real kicker came after they pulled away, though. Within minutes, my driveway became like a scene out of The Birds. It seems the ants weren’t the only ones to get a feast out of this.

I went out to collect the can, and found that the bottom of it was still about an inch think with the little suckers. I flipped the can over, dropped it to the street, and :: schlorp ::, the can was empty. I wheeled the can back up the driveway, and hadn’t even gotten the door closed when the feeding frenzy was back in full swing. Some damn happy birds in my neighborhood this morning. I went outside 10 minutes later, and there was nary a maggot to be found anywhere.

Yeah, it was kinda nasty, but when I think about how fast the birdseed vanishes from the feeder in the yard, I dunno…a little bit of rotten meat could save me a few bucks.

2

Thank you for sharing?

Ah, the Circle of Life. Glad to hear that the birds and ants are saving you some nasty clean-up duties. :smiley:

3

Gee thanks Hal. You know me, always up for a good maggot story. :smiley:

4

Speaking from experience here. I’m willing to bet that although the garbage man didn’t bat an eye publicly, he wasn’t none too happy with what he had to pick up. Particularly if he remembers that you haven’t put the trash out for the past 4 pickups.

I used to work for a recycling/garbage company and would often go out with the drivers for a change of pace. The things they said about some of the customers…whoo boy.

Maybe a nice tip at Xmas, or a box of doughnuts (obviously labelled as ‘not trash!’)?

5

When it comes to the Maggot know line… Je’r da man!

6

hehehe. Each summer I see a few animals with maggot infested wounds. The worst was a dog that was chained to a dog house and given minimal care. The dog had whipworms, which led to a colitisy diarrhea. The dog was generally ungroomed and had a “bushy” coat. His perineal area was scalded by the diarrhea, and he wound up with maggots crawling around under his tissue.

Working on the dog (under anesthesia) was gross. His skin “rippled” from the motion of the maggots. We did not weigh the collected maggots, but we half filled a tall kitchen garbage bag with combined maggots/fur/dead tissue. One of my technicians lost her lunch, and she is generally a strong stomached individual.

And that is my maggot story.:wink:

7

vetbridge my mom is a nurse. She has told an all to similiar story with the only difference being the main charachter in her’s was a human.

::off to find the Pukey smilie::

8

Geez vetbridge, heh, you made Hal look like an amatuer.

9

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH

10

Odd sort of hijack to this story…

Many years ago, I was involved with a woman at work. For obvious reasons, we kept our relationship quiet around the workplace.

One weekend, she had a similar problem with the trash, and, being the strudy boyfriend, I was pressed into service to rid the area of the Teeming Maggot Millions.

That Monday at work, I was mentioning the story to my office-mate… leaving out, of course, the identity of the damsel in distress. Later that day… busted! My office-mate closed the door and gleefully announced, “I knew it! You’re sleeping with K!” I asked how he could possibly reach such a conclusion – turns out SHE had also told the maggot story to a few listeners, also omitting details about her hero… but my buddy knew the odds of TWO maggot stories happening over the same weekend in the same office were negligble.

So… I was busted on an intra-office romance by maggots.

11

Anyone else originally stop reading at this point, assuming that the maggots, um…never mind. :wink:

12

We don’t get a lot of maggots around here; don’t really know why. Just not a buggy kinda place, I guess. I think a garbage-can full would be fairly gross.

Oh, that reminds me of my own maggot story - eating lunch at the hospital cafeteria way back when I was a lab tech student, I got a maggot in my soup. I took it back to the cashier, who asked me if I wanted a different bowl. Um, no, thanks anyway; I’ll just take my money back. The maggot in the soup didn’t seem to be a big deal to her at all - plus, as far as I knew, they fed the patients the same things as the cafeteria got.

13

vetbridge, I did.

Maggots for some reason reach right down into my psyche and flip *all * the levers. The one time I saw oodles of them crawling all over a garbage bag in downtown Albany I nearly threw up. I simply can’t deal with them, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m not usually the frail, girly type, but maggots…
Don’t know how you could deal with it, Hal.
shudder

Bricker, you’re a good man.

14

Great maggot stories vetbridge and Bricker. Ok, I’ll admit I was kinda hesitant about whether or not I wanted to know where Bricker was gonna go with his story but I read on anyways. After all, it was a maggot (at least maggot related) story!

15

Back a number of years ago when I was a student, I used to jog across a lake on the top of the dam a couple of times a week because of the scenery and the solitude. One day I saw that a dead dog was on the path and realized that over the course of the next couple of weeks I was going to be witness to it’s summertime decay. Joy.

The stench was terrible but seeing, as others have mentioned, the “rippling” under it’s skin as maggots went about their business was definately a visual finger to the back of your throat. One day there was even a decent sized rattlesnake curled up next to it (the rocky side of the dam was crawling with them) and I distinctly remember thinking “Please Lord, don’t let me have a heart attack now in this desolate location where I’d not be found for days right next to a rattlesnake and a maggot infested dog”. I’m guessing the maggots came for the dog, the field mice for the maggots and the rattlesnake for the field mice. Nice.

Eventually they did their work effeciently enough that not much was left except for a dog shaped stain on the asphalt from the… ummm… dogjuice.

Ah, until today I’d managed to forget this little visual. Thanks Hal. :slight_smile:

16

I’ll assume here that you always close your eyes for that bathroom scene in Poltergeist, Anaamika.

17

I can’t believe no one has said they did the ick dance. I was doing it in my cube just reading this stuff. I don’t do maggots, they are the reason I have trouble eating the really long grain rice. Occasionally I’ll look down at the plate and the twelve year old in the back of my head blurts “Hey! do you know what that looks like?” Eew, ick dance all over again.

18

Oooooooohhhh Maggot stories!!

I loves me some maggots! So - I was taking a class in immature insect taxonomy at MSU (the insects are immature, not the students - at least that’s what I’m sticking with). Every week in the first half of the semester (Sept - Oct), we would go out on a collecting trip to find various larvae and nymphs. Usually to the woods to get various “in rotten tree” types or “in the grass” types. However one of the classic trips that live in infamy is the “rotting carcass” trips. Yes, we drove the roads of East Lansing looking for rotting carcasses. As soon as someone spotted one - the van pulled over and out popped 10 eager students running for the road kill. Then we had to take turns prodding (P.U.) the particular “specimen” and digging out all the maggots we could find. Bag 'em and Tag 'em!

I have the best memories of that class… And of course there’s the Forensic Entomology class with the dead pig in the field. Bugs are so completely fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

Anyone care to discuss botflies??

19

Ok, everybody else is afraid of the *other * parts in the movie, the clown, etc. They’re scary too but…

I saw that movie at 10, and that scene has traumatized me ever since. I had dreams about it for years. For years, I would take super-quick showers, just to get out of the bathroom fast.

Mine, too. And I’m Indian, and my SO’s Chinese, so you *know * there’s a lot of rice being eaten in our house. And it’s all long-grain Basmati (I won that battle, hee hee).

20

Ugh. Reading these stories, I totally had a mini puke (you know, when you puke a little, but swallow it back). I HATE maggots. And roaches. I like all other bugs; spiders, worms, slugs; no problem. I mean, I really like worms, I think they’re cute. But no maggots, no roaches.

My maggot story…

Near my house as a child, there was a nice park with a largish lake. I used to play there all the time. When I was about 8 I was playing near the lake and I saw a small rabbit sitting near the lake, sort of half in the cattails. It was facing the lake, so I started to kinda sneak up on it. I just wanted to see it up close, you know? So I’m sneaking up, waiting for the moment when it bolts and I just keep getting closer and closer. Now, I’m being really slow and quiet, so even though I’m a bit surprised its letting me get this close, in my 8 year old brain it makes sense. Finally I’m right next to it, and at this point I sort of freeze. It was so pretty. I mean, I could only see its back and tail, but it was pretty and soft looking, and I could see it breathing. I think I was sort of scared, too, because even though its only a rabbit I was nervous about what would happen if I startled it. Finally I reach out and start to gently pet its back. And when I do, it rolls over.

Someone had shot it in the face. About half its head was gone, and it was FULL of maggots. That’s what made it look like it was breathing; all the thousands of maggots inside the fur crawling around. When it fell over a whole pile of them sort of poured out of the eye socket and head hole onto my shoes. I puked all over myself and ran home. It was probably one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me.