How Long Would A Body Last In San Francisco Bay?

For some reason I can't post comments on my blog, and I'm still looking into how to fix that. But this is an interesting discussion which has ended up at VOS's video of an elephant being eaten to the bone by predators within a week.

The thing is, how can we tell how much predator feeding Laci's remains might have been subjected to in the bay?

What's in the bay? What's eating what?

And;

Other bodies wind up in the bay, obviously. There must be, somewhere, people who could testify at an expert level on how fast bodies decompose in the bay. Or at least how fast bodies of, say, sea lions decompose.

Invasions and Extinctions Reshape Coastal Marine Food Webs is one example of an article I found which suggests that most of the carnivorous activity in the bay comes from "filter feeders" like shellfish. The summary states that 70 percent of extinctions come from the top of the food chain (top predators and other carnivores).

This Science Daily article from June 21 discusses how dire ocean extinction rates are.

The article corresponds to news items I've seen over the years which, taken all together, paint a worrisome picture. Garbage patches the size of large states are floating around in the Pacific. Tens of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water have been dumped into the Pacific from the melting-down Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant. 172 million gallons of oil in the Gulf are now slicking the bottom of the sea and killing sea life there. At least 8.1 million gallons of toxic Corexit (and likely more, according to Congressman Ed Markey)were thrown after the oil in the gulf. 

Keep in mind water migrates and mixes over time. Drilling platforms are crusting coastlines worldwide, bringing dramatic changes to ecosystems over the past 100 years. It's not rocket science; when you look at the overall picture and consider the fact that major problems combined can increase loss exponentially, the oceans are in very big trouble. And if we lose them, as a species, we're done. They are literally that important. 

So--what does all this mean for the subject at hand? To me, it suggests that larger animals might not exist in the numbers needed to finish consuming human remains as quickly as the big cats and hyenas picked that elephant clean. The elephant's a lot bigger, but there was a lot of activity there. 

No one has so far brought up that cistern that Citizen Q photographed and sent to the court..