I tried suggesting something like that too, Larry. He's just adding 2 repetitive posts a day. A post called "Woollybear's Gallery" would be so much more useful. It would give you one place to look at all his photos and commentary. We had someone like this on another list. Really useful messages just get buried. It destroys the structure of a forum. I am trying to bump older messages up. K

HI - Thanks for reply. It's definitely not a Gt.Diving Beetle / Dragon fly nymph etc. I should have mentioned that it is legless (as far as I can tell - the eyesight is not what it once was) and has no obvious jaws - being very pointed at the 'front'. It resembles a common blow-fly maggot, (except bigger and brown) so I would suspect some form of fly larva rather than beetle?

As to a nitrogen draw by decomposition, I'd have to suspect that nut shells wouldn't do that. It's very hard to compost them unless you grind them up first. The point about salt, however, is a good one. Just washing off the surface salt isn't enough. The shells are going to have absorbed a lot of salt, and they'll release it slowly in a moist mix. I'm not sure if it's done like this for pistachios, but for salted peanuts the salting process is actually done by pulling a vacuum on them, which sucks brine both inside the shell and into the shell itself.

They look like puparia (cocoons for flies). The maggots pupated in there, and popped out as flies. So basically, you're raising flies in the trash. :) They mature really fast when it's warm and the maggots like to crawl out to a clean spot to pupate. In cooler weather the trash is probably dumped before they get to that stage but in the summer, you might have to bag kitchen trash.