10 Things That Happen To Your Body After You Die

2. Decomposition #3: Colonisation

When a body begins to purge, it becomes just irresistible to all manner of critters looking for the perfect place to lay their eggs.

Flies will lay hundreds of eggs, which will hatch forth into hundreds of maggots. This giant, wriggling mass of maggots can raise the body temperature by as much as 10°C meaning that they have to keep constantly shifting and flowing to ensure that the maggots at the bottom of the pile don't just cook.

These maggots feast on the putrefying flesh and grow into flies which, in turn, lay their own eggs on the corpse until all of the skin and flesh has been consumed.

The maggots attract their own predators such as birds, ants, wasp and spiders, creating a neat little ecosystem. Larger scavengers may also show up to get in on the action whilst there is still solid flesh. A pack of vultures (sometimes appropriately known as a "wake") can strip a cadaver in a couple of hours.

The liquids that pour forth from the cadaver are extremely rich in nitrogen. So rich, in fact, that it kills that plants in the surrounding soil, but after a while it makes it extremely fertile, allowing all manner of plants and fungi to sprout up.

Eventually, all of the energy locked up in the human body is cycled back into nature where it began.

It's kinda beautiful if you can stomach the horrifically putrefying corpses.