Introduction

Hi everyone.

This is me with a 500 lb decomposing sow. All of the white stuff you see on and around the sow are maggots. Part of a forensic entomology workshop I helped teach for FBI agents.

My name is Charity Owings and I am a second year masters student in entomology. Basically, I study vertebrate decomposition, both human and non-human animals. My current thesis is focused on phenotypic plasticity of blow flies in Texas and applications to forensic entomology. Mycology doesn't really play a part in my masters work, but it definitely will in my PhD research. I've been interested in decomposition ecology since I was an undergraduate and got the chance to intern at one of the decomposition facilities, or "body farms", in Texas. Here, I saw how various types of organisms compete for, coexist on, and consume human remains. Many of the organisms I observed, and still observe on many sets of remains, were fungi. For my PhD research, I hope to identify major fungal taxa colonizing cadavers and generate a model for succession. I'm also interested in the relationship between fungi and microarthropods also present on a body and in the soil adjacent to the body. The overall goal would be to apply successional models and other ecological relationships to a forensic setting in order to more accurately estimate the postmortem interval (time from death to discovery).

Basically:
I love insects, taxonomy, and dead things.
I'm not easily grossed-out.
My lab smells very bad. I spend a lot of time in my lab. Therefore, I often smell bad. Sorry.

All for now.

C