Old timey gangsters used to be famous for giving their enemies a “pair of cement shoes,” and sending them off to “sleep with the fishies.” Of course humans can’t survive in water, but what hasn’t been very well known until now, is how the human body decomposes underwater.
A team of researchers in Canada has been studying how water and various aquatic life breaks down bodies. What they found is that depending on how oxygen rich the water is, a body can be stripped clean by sea life in just three weeks.
For the site of their experiment, the researchers chose Saanich Inlet in Western Canada.
Instead of using real human bodies, which might be considered unethical, they used pig bodies instead because of their similarities to humans.
The first two bodies that researchers dropped in the water were stripped to the bones very quickly (about 3 weeks) by the inlet’s crustaceans. However a third body took almost 90 days to be eaten. It was discovered that the difference in decomposition time was due to the lack of oxygen in water where the third body was placed.
Something else that researchers found is that feet naturally come apart from the skeleton as it decomposes. If a body were dumped while wearing shoes, the rubber soles might cause the detached foot to float to the surface. This might explain the strange phenomenon of jogging shoes with feet still in them washing up on beaches.
(Via: IFL Science)
So I guess the next time you’re being kidnapped by gangsters and given a pair of cement shoes, you should ask to be dumped in an area of ocean with a low oxygen content. So creepy.
