Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Maggot Art

Female voice: So you guys ready for your maggots?
30 excited kids: Yeah!!!
Female voice: Be ready, when I put him on your page he?s going to start moving around.
Rebecca O?Flaherty is handing out maggots to a classroom of 30 5th graders at Woodridge Elementary school in North Sacramento. Students are sitting at their desks with pieces of white paper, mini-paper cups containing red, blue and yellow water-based paint and tweasers.
So I?m going to give you a maggot and I?m going to put him on your piece of paper and then it?s going to be your job to pick him up and put him in the paint and so once he?s got a little bit of paint on him then you?ll put him back on the page and he?ll start crawling around.
These are clean maggots, or baby flies, that O?Flaherty has raised in a lab. One of the students, Jaisun Barham, has just dipped his maggot into a cup of blue paint and is watching the larvae move across the page. He says he used to be grossed out at the sight of maggots.
?Cause when I saw them in the garbage can they would just eat bones and stuff like that but now I?m not really grossed out. It?s just cool how they just go side to side in all different directions.
Renae Vierra isn?t so eager to start dipping her maggot.
This is nasty looking. It?s really squirming around a lot.
Davion Debruce is fascinated ? watching his yellow-drenched maggot inch across the paper.
And you can see the reflex of the body going up and up.
Rebecca O?Flaherty is in the middle of the classroom, watching the kids with a smile on her face.
I don?t see that anybody is having any trouble touching the maggots. There was a little bit of hesitation at first by a few of them but they seemed to all get into it.
This is her sixth year of teaching Maggot Art. O?Flaherty is a forensic entomologist. She sees a lot of maggots in her line of work. When a dead body is discovered at a crime scene she examines the maggots to determine the time of death. Maggots trail fluid behind when they leave a carcass. That?s how O?Flaherty got the idea for Maggot Art.
I guess too many late nights hanging out with my maggots in the lab and just decided to give paint a try and so maggot art was born.
Milne: When you tell people what you do, do they think it?s kind of quirky?
Um (laughs), I?m one of those people that sits on the airplane and puts headphones on and does not talk to the person next to me because they think I?m truly disgusting and they want to sit somewhere else (laughs). It?s been difficult on the dating scene for sure.
She may avoid the subject with prospective dates but O?Flaherty is quick to talk with kids about her passion for maggots and entomology.
They?re amazing creatures. For many, many, many years people have used them in medicine. Physicians early on discovered that maggots were much better at cleaning out wounds then they were with their scalpels and in fact they promote healing and they kill bacteria and they?re just really neat little guys.
I?m doing this I guess because I love taking maggots into the classrooms and getting kids excited about what I do, excited about science. They don?t get too many opportunities to do a lot of hands on science and this is a really unique combination of science and art.
Nat sound of student and O?Flaherty talking: Do they climb up stuff? They do, if you leave him in your paint cup he?ll climb up the side of it.
As O?Flaherty answers questions, teacher Justin Newcomb walks around his classroom to help students with their artwork.
This is something that my students will remember for the rest of their lives and it?s different and it?s exciting and maybe we won?t think of maggots as such gross little creatures.
Newcomb says Maggot Art is a hit with his class.
Maggots have become cool they?re the new thing (laughs)
Some of the kids are asking O?Flaherty if they can take their maggots home. She?ll decline that request but she says it?s a good sign she?s made an impression.
It?s a lot of fun to see them be truly excited about my little guys, my maggots ?cause I think they?re pretty exciting too.
O?Flaherty is working on a how-to book for teachers so that they can hold their own Maggot Art workshops. Her entomologist friends are holding similar Maggot Art workshops in Hawaii and Michigan. And in her spare time she creates her own Maggot Art paintings with several colleagues at U-C Davis. These are much more elaborate and vivid pieces then the artwork created by the kids. You can see it on display through mid-March at the Capital Athletic Club in Sacramento.