FAVOURITE MAGGOTS

Candida Crewe opens up

a can of worms and looks into some fishy business

'THESE ones came out of a camel's nostril,' Ken Smith said cheerfully, holding up a glass phial. It contained a dozen inch-long orange maggots, all plumply contained in clear alcohol. He shook their tiny glass house, and they wiggled under my nose, feigning life.

Mr Smith, 59, is an entomologist. He has a face which shines with good humour and a pair of spectacles which hang round his neck on a thin black rope. He also has a special cupboard in the cramped little room in the Natural History Museum's insect department where he has worked for 26 years. This is where he keeps his phials, among other things.

It was a cold morning when I went to visit Mr Smith and three of his colleagues having heard, quite by chance, of some strange goings-on behind the scenes at that famous institution in South Kensington. Like most people, I had always associated it with school trips and dinosaurs. But it appears the scientists who work there in their capacity as experts in particular fields regularly have to deal with unimaginable requests. Much of their time, in fact, is spent going to great lengths to advise and give information to any company, industry, official body or individual who happens to ask for help.

'I call this cupboard my little Black Museum,' Mr Smith pronounced on open- ing its doors and bringing out the late inhabitants of some wretched camel's nose. 'And these maroon grubs here,' he added, producing another phial, 'were from the bodies of the victims of the 1935 Ruxton murder case.'

On an upper shelf I spotted a bottle of Dettol and, rather curiously, I thought, some Lyle's Golden Syrup. Mr Smith explained: show people the tin's famous illustration when I give lectures on the forensic aspect of my job.' (For occasional- ly it is the police who turn to him with grisly enquiries.) 'I point out that the bees buzzing round the carcass were more likely to have been a type of hover fly. You see, my niche is dealing with maggots. As well as studying those in food and the ones which transmit diseases, for instance, I also study all the different ones found on a corpse at its various stages of decay.'

Mr Smith opened a book he had written and showed me a table. 'The hover fly usually moves in after six months or so, but, before that, the bluebottle maggots feed on the fresh flesh of a newly dead body. And the cheese skippers — like those found in Stilton — arrive after three months. Then when the body begins to smell sweet, it's the fruit flies' turn. The hover flies appear only when the carcass has reached a semi-liquid state. Then as it dries out it's beetles, clothes-moths, mag- gots and mites.'

Some years ago Mr Smith worked on a case involving the body of a woman which had spent some days in a sauna. When the murderous husband went to dump her in a lay-by, he found he couldn't quite part with all of her, so he cut off her head and took it back home. These unusually misleading circumstances meant the pathologist was unable to fix the time of death. Thus Mr Smith was called in.

'That one was complicated,' he said. 'There are different time-sequences of maggot invasion depending on the situa- tion the body's left in, you see. Tempera- ture and coverings, for example. In that instance I was able to link the grubs on the two parts of severed neck and so work things out from that.

'And I solved the case of the kinky Downing Street policeman. He'd trussed up a prostitute in rubber, strangled her, wrapped up bits of her in polythene, and distributed the various parcels down drains and all about the area.'

Smith is often sent muscle tissue from victims' bodies. He generally keeps it on his windowsill. 'I'm so used to it, I don't get squeamish. But if I've had a bit of body in it can become smelly in here, which I do dislike. And I don't relish looking under the microscope and seeing a victim's blood moving up and down inside the guts of wriggling grubs.'

In fact Mr Smith's job is one with much scope for squeamishness. Each year, for instance, he has to deal with about six people who have delusory parasitosis (Ekbom's Syndrome). This is a mental condition (usually affecting stressful middle-aged women) which provokes hal- lucination of infestation of the body by jumping, biting 'bugs'. Sufferers tend to send Mr Smith long letters about their complaint. More often than not he is the unfortunate recipient, too, of what he calls their 'little packages'.

'This is worse in a way than working with maggots because I never know what I might find — dust, scabs, hairs, scrapings of skin from earholes or feet — all of which I have to examine minutely for signs of insect life. Of course there's never any- thing there, but I have to check because people can really have mites or urticating hairs on their skin.'

Downstairs I met David Carter, a thin, bearded fellow who lives in Surrey and who goes in for such charming pastimes as analysing the contents of foxes' stomachs.

He is an amiable man whose expertise lies in the study of moths and larvae (and whose room, incidentally, reeks of naph- thalene crystals). Mr Carter's speciality is the clothes moth.

'Last week I had to identify the cause of this,' Mr Carter told me, holding up a leaking bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1959 sent to him by a gloomy wine merchant. He had discovered the cork had been invaded by a white grub. 'Brown house- moth, that was; £200 or so down the drain,' Mr Carter said.

An arachnologist, Paul Hillyard, over in the Zoology Department, had more tales to tell of identification. Quite regularly Mr Hillyard receives letters from concerned individuals or food companies. 'Could you please', read one, 'identify the enclosed subject which was found in an almond fudge flavour ice-cream.' It was from a county council health department. Mr Hill- yard's diagnosis proved the unwelcome alien to be a Geophilus carpophagus, a two-inch-long centipede.

In the course of his duties, Halyard had also come across scorpions in a can of red cherries, a box of mangoes and bunches of bananas; a millipede in a bottle of milk and a money spider in an injectable phar- maceutical product.

'Once I helped the police to solve a crime. The case rested on some spider's webs on an old wall at the scene of the murder. By catching and identifying the spider, and by knowing its habits, I was able to tell the detectives the time in the morning the web was mostly likely to have been spun, and how long the process would have taken. So they were then able more accurately to determine when the murder took place.'

Mr Hillyard paused and smiled, adding happily, 'I feel pretty lucky to have been put into spiders, frankly. They vary so much and are so pretty.' The tone of his voice was steeped with affection for his 50,000 or so crawly charges in the museum's collection.

Dr Wyn Wheeler is the head of the department of Zoology where Mr Hillyard works, but his concern is fish. He has worked at the museum for 38 years, and as a leading ichthyologist knows all there is to know about his subjects.

He had an improbable question posed to him by the Standard Telephone and Cable company about sharks biting into and damaging their underwater cable. 'They sent us a length with teeth embedded in it,' Dr Wheeler recalled. 'I identified them as belonging to a particular kind of shark. But unfortunately there wasn't much I could do in the way of advice. I had a theory it might have been the orange colour of the cable which was attracting them, but was unable to say so for sure.' He shook his head. If he was bemused, after my visit my mind buzzed like a caerulean-posteriored dipteran.