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Trilobites

Sometimes Nature is Morbid. That’s Why There’s #BestCarcass.

A frozen fox that was recovered from the Danube River in Germany in December.Credit...Johannes Stehle/DPA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Warning: The photos with some of the tweets that this article links to depict graphic scenes from nature.

If you ever had a photo of an animal carcass stashed away on your computer or phone because you were too mesmerized to trash it, and you were too terrified about what others would think to share it, you are not alone. Since Tuesday biologists and the morbidly curious alike have been blowing up Twitter with a photo contest for #BestCarcass.

The photos depict a kind of heavy metal version of your typical nature documentary. Swollen, shriveled, gnarled, bloody, stringy, flattened, crusty, sometimes frozen in place: the pictures aren’t conventionally pretty. But beyond the gore, each photo contains a story — not just about the lives of the animals involved, but about those making and sharing the photos. So even if you’re not sitting on a stash of decaying animal photos, for those of you with an inquisitive mind and a strong stomach, now is your moment.

The macabre Twitter battle emerged on Jan. 10 after a group of scientists, who have all studied African carnivores and know one another through Twitter, started sharing photos of prey from the field. Julien Fattebert, an ecologist at the Swiss Ornithological Institute (Vogelwarte), started the hashtag.

Other biologists followed. And once Anne Hilborn, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, who has a loyal Twitter following, chimed in, photos from all over the world started rolling in.

“Everyone started sharing pictures of dead animals, more or less decomposed,” Dr. Fattebert wrote in an email. “There’s obviously an aesthetically macabre side to it — I think some of these images are pure gold!”

The hashtag’s initial momentum surprised him, but he was glad it happened. “Death is inherent to life, and we have to deal with it more often than not. And it’s sometimes disgusting, yes,” he wrote. “I think this hashtag has opened a window on this side of life science.” Or as he put it on Twitter:

There will never be a real #BestCarcass winner, said the scientists, but some qualities make a photo stand out. For Ms. Hilborn, the ideal #BestCarcass reveals an interesting backstory, an artistic angle or a morbid sense of humor.

For others, it’s the gore.

“There’s an ideal Goldilocks middle ground of decomposition where you want it to look bad enough that people say, ‘Oh gross,’ but not so gone that it’s just bones and skin,” said Arjun Dheer, a conservation biologist who studies hyenas and posted a photo from his research when the hashtag emerged.

Finally, others are drawn to the remnants of an animal’s final behavior seen in the carcass.

The stories behind some of the photos illustrate these points.

Emanuele Biggi, a naturalist and conservation photographer, shot this image of a mass mortality of thousands of frogs in a pond in Aveto Regional Park in northern Italy. “Sometimes climate change is striking in a odd way, surprising the frogs with extreme cold and ice while they’re already breeding into water,” he wrote in an email.

And then there was the miscarried fetus of a zebra, which was just one of many images shared by Ms. Hilborn, who studies the hunting behavior of cheetahs in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, which she said is covered in carcasses. She drove past what appeared to her to be a miscarried zebra. She stopped and took photos because she was impressed by the level of detail she could see. And she says this photo shows that sometimes diseases cause miscarriages on the Serengeti, although it’s not totally clear that’s what happened here.

Not everyone was comfortable with this level of gore. Ms. Hilborn acknowledges that especially gory photos may benefit from warnings, but she doesn’t think people should stop posting. Everyone, she said, must draw her own line.

“As a biologist, I think my line is a lot further than others because I deal with a lot of death in my research,” she said. “But I try to make sure there’s some kind of educational part of it. I’m not just posting to shock people.”

When Ted Stankowich, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at California State University, Long Beach, saw the hashtag moving on Twitter, he took it as an opportunity to share some of the gruesome images from his field work. He posted an image of the leftover anal gland of a skunk, which was untouched by predators and scavengers at a park in California.

Dr. Stankowich is trying to understand how some animals, like coyotes, have adapted to avoid skunks, while other animals, like some domestic dogs, haven’t. This leftover anal gland, the part that holds the skunk’s signature smell, is an indication that the animal that ate it knew of the stench lurking inside.

And in Germany, a newspaper called Schwäbische Zeitung shared its image from a story about a fox ice cube that a hunter had found in Fridingen. The fox had drowned after falling through the ice while trying to cross the Danube River in December, Yannick Dillinger, an editor at the paper, wrote in an email.

Ms. Hilborn sees the educational value of #BestCarcass and hopes the contest never ends and continues to reveal a taboo side of the life cycle. And although the hashtag’s momentum is already slowing down, biology Twitter users, with their unusual senses of humor, are bound to produce another unpredictable social media trend soon.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Body Art: Postcards From Nature’s Dark Side. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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