UW-Platteville students have been working on an unusual research project measuring the decomposition of pigs in the northern climate. The project started last semester by criminal justice students Marissa Johnson and Michael Annable, and being continued on by other students into the 2008-09 school year.

The project’s purpose is to study decompostion rates in the northern climate. Pigs are used in this type of research because they are similar in body composition to humans; therefore, they serve as good models for decomposition studies. There is a lack of these types of studies for our climate. The results from this research can help investigators determine the time and cause of death in homicide cases.

“This project is a unique endeavor to this area; it’s educational for our students and law enforcement,” criminal justice lecturer Arille Dutelle said.

The students spend hours working on the project. They keep journals and write entries of the data they collect from the pigs.

“We did sixty entries in a journal, and it takes an hour to fill up a journal,” Johnson said. “Between research and collecting data we put in about 250 hours working on this project together.”

Larissa Larsen, a chemistry major with a criminalistics emphasis, is one of the students doing current active research at the Forensic Investigations Research Facility. Larsen became involved with the project because she wanted to test herself and be part of a positive influence on future law enforcement investigations.

“I thought it was a great opportunity to not only apply what I’ve learned in my classes, but to also test myself in terms of whether I would be able to handle working with the various elements of a crime scene, including dead and decomposing bodies,” Larsen said.

Students currently working on the project have created a system and schedule to do their observations. The group spends about eight to 12 hours per week at the FIRF in the first three weeks of their research. The hours of work will continue to grow and the group could end up spending 25 to 35 hours a week depending on the acceleration of the decomposition rate.

“We established a system in which observations would be made three times a day. One of us would go out to the FIRF around 8 a.m., another around 1 p.m and a third around 6 p.m.,” Larsen said. “Each time we would make observations and take pictures, and the second person out to the farm would record the temperature data. On average, the process would take one to two hours.”

The UW-P Foundation 1866 Fund donated funds toward the project. The project also received funding from the Criminal Justice department. The group has received continued research funding for the 2008-09 school year from Pioneer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.