Forensic Entomology
Calliphoridae
Calliphoridae
• Calliphoridae is a family of flies more colloquially referred to as blow
flies with over 1,000 species. Blow flies have triple-segmented
antennas between their compound eyes with a hair or artista which
has its own hairs. Most species are metallic-looking , although the
shimmer of their epicuticles may be covered by fine hairs from the fly
itself or by dust or powder the fly has picked up. Blow flies live
everywhere but the poles. Generally inactive at night and in the
winter and late fall in places where it gets cold during those times.
• Most blow flies can smell a carcass 1 mile away, some species, 10
miles away
• Blow flies are pioneers, and the first blow flies usually arrive within
minutes of death, but in the bloated stage, many more blow flies
show up, attracted by the smell of the decomposing gasses.
• Very useful as ToD indicators, but estimations are less and less
accurate with each successive generation
Life Cycle of Blow Flies
• Eggs (eclosion after 8 -24 hours)
• Larvae (3 instars) feed for 8 to 12 days
• First instar (middle length of time), second (shortest)
• Third instar (longest) move up to 10 meters away to pupate
end of third instar, the outer cuticle hardens into a
puparium and darkens during a period of roughly 10 hours
• Pupal Stage
Adults emerge between 77 and 134 hrs. in the puparium
Adult
• Rate of growth and thus amount of time it takes the egg to become an adult, and
final adult size is influenced by temperature
• Amount of nutrients available to the larvae also affects size; more food, bigger fly
• Each batch of eggs is typically 150-200, but can vary by amount of
nutrients available to mother fly
• Generally very shiny and white, around 0.9 mm to more than 1.50
mm long and are around 0.3-0.4 mm wide (Rognes, 1991)
• Eggs are left behind after eclosion, but are then often blown by the
wind into a powder
How the blow fly detects food
• The fly first uses its olfactory receptors to locate human remains and
then does a visual search in hopes of finding natural or artificial bodily
openings. Flies walk all over the decedent and look for food (and a
place to lay eggs in the case of female flies ready to do so) using the
taste receptors are which on the sensory organs on their body, legs,
and feet to find food and an oviposition site. She wants to lay her eggs
in natural bodily openings with mucus membranes for nutrients or in
wounds because the blood in wounds supplies moisture, sugar, and
protein to the larvae.
Some methods of Species Identification
Forensic entomologists often ID every species found on or very near
the decedent
• Species identification via morphology of adult flies can be done using
a dissecting microscope
• Species identification of larvae can require DNA analysis, knowledge
of internal or external morphological characteristics, other molecular
methods, or a combination of both morphological changes and DNA
analysis.
Sometimes it is easiest to raise eggs and larvae until they can be
identified as adults.
Mitochondrial DNA
• No recombination in manufacturing of mtDNA
• Roughly 16,000 base pairs of double-strand DNA in mtDNA genomes
MtDNA is Resistant to degeredation
After extraction and a polymerase chain reaction if there were fewer than 1,000
base pairs extracted, sequences for the protein coding regions are run through a
database and compared with the DNA of known species. If the DNA from the
insect matches the haplotype of one in the system, then it you know which bug it
is.
Possible future Alternative
• Allozymes are enzymes that vary significantly by species
• Iso-electric focusing (isolating proteins on polyacrylamide gels and
creating stains)
• Comparing the levels of 42 different allozymes, researches in Australia
successfully distinguished between 4 species of calliphorids.
• Results come in 3 hours, faster than traditional DNA barcoding
Estimating Minimum Time of Death
Internal morphological analysis
Cuticular hydrocarbon analysis (each species produces of hydrycarbon depending
on its developmental stage) needs more data, but works for the tested species
Pteridine fluorescence analysis is also being explored
Isomegalen diagrams (kill larvae immediately, indoors if temperature is known or
other controlled conditions)
Variety of methods using degree days or degree hours can be used to confirm ToD
estimation
The one I can understand is the following
Time(hours) * (average Temperature – base temperature) = ADH (degree hours)
Time(days) * ( average Temperature – base temperature) = ADD (degree days)
• Being cold-blooded, insects cannot control body temperature and
thus need the ambient temperature to be within a certain range.
Below a certain temperature and above another temperature the fly-
to-be will stop growing, and too much lower or higher than those
temperatures, respectively, the it dies. Otherwise, there is a
hypothesis stating a linear relationship between heat and growth of
insect. Third instar larvae have produced a recorded 10 degrees
Celsius. Relatively large maggot masses produce heat, so it’s
important to account for that and to account for temperature
fluctuations.
Species Met Data Corrected met data base temperature ADD
Calliphora Vicina 13.20 14.68 1.00 Celsius 13.68
Time(hours) * (average Temperature – base temperature) = ADH (degree hours)
Time(hours) * (14.68 – 1.00) = 13.68
Time = 13.68/(14.86 – 1.00)
Time = 0.98701298701
Base temperatures of a few species in Celsius
• Calliphora vicina 2.0
• Calliphora vomitoria 3.0
• Protophormia terraenovae 7.8
• Lucilia Sericata 9.0
• Chrysomya albiceps 10.2
• Phormia regina 11.2
• Muscina stabulans 7.2
• Unlike cockroaches, the thoraxes of blow flies do not touch the
ground and leave blood trails that way when they walk through blood,
but they are often guilty of leaving foot prints that may be easily
mistake for high velocity blood spatter. Blow flies also like to eat
blood, regurgitate it, and ingest it again after enzymes have broken
down parts of the blood. And then the flies digest it and dispose of it
as fecal matter. The regurgitated and pooped out blood is known as
fly specks that are very tiny comma shaped spots that the untrained
eye can easily mistake for high velocity blood spatter.
Effects of drugs on blow flies
• Paracetamol in pig livers that some calliphorids were feeding on
accelerated growth, most significantly after the third and fourth days
of eating, but changing concentrations in the liver did not have
noticeable effects
• Morphine retarded the larval growth of C. vicina and Lucilia sericata
Things that delay flies
The arrival of blow flies can be delayed by treating the body with
insecticides and by great enough distances over water that the flies
cannot smell the body.Rain delayed oviposition until the rain stopped in
one outdoor study. Some wasps of Ectimneus polynesialis was observed
by a graduate student to have eaten so many flies so quickly that it took
longer than normal for flies to lay the first eggs on the carcass. Ants eat
the maggots.
Other forensic uses of blow flies
Drugs in bowels of flies may be useful
Black bottle flies prefer to lay eggs in shade, the black bottle flies’ presence on a fresh body
killed that day in a sunny field may indicate that the body has been moved.
If you suspect there might be drugs in an insect’s stomach that need to be analyzed, then it is
important to kill and store the flies in a way that the stomach contents will not be
contaminated. Freezing
Some species of blowflies are only found in certain regions
Misc.
• More and more blow flies show up at the bloated stage, attracted by
the smells of the gases.
• Larger bodies attract significantly more flies
Bibliography
• Byrd, Jason H.Castner, James L., eds. Forensic Entomology: The Utility Of Arthropods In Legal Investigations. Boca Raton : CRC
Press/Taylor & Francis, 2010. Print.
• Conklin, Barbara Gardner., Gardner, Robert.Shortelle, Dennis.Encyclopedia Of Forensic Science: A Compendium Of Detective Fact And
Fiction. Westport, Conn. : Oryx Press, 2002. Print.
• Gennard, Dorothy E. Forensic Entomology: An Introduction. Chichester, West Sussex : Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Print.
• Reibe, S. and B. Madea. "How Promptly Do Blowflies Colonise Fresh Carcasses? A Study Comparing Indoor with Outdoor
Locations." Forensic Science International, vol. 195, no. 1-3, 25 Feb. 2010, pp. 52-57. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.forsciint.2009.11.009.
• Goff, M. Le. A Fly For The Prosecution: How Insect Evidence Helps Solve Crimes. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2000.
Print.
• Jens Amendt, Current Concepts in Forensic Entomology, 2010, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V, page 121
• Madhu, Bala and Sharma Anika. "Review of some Recent Techniques of Age Determination of Blow Flies Having Forensic
Implications." Egyptian Journal of Forensic Sciences, Vol 6, Iss 3, Pp 203-208 (2016), no. 3, 2016, p. 203. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1016/j.ejfs.2015.06.002.
• Marina Vianna Braga, Zeneida Teixeira Pinto, Margareth Maria de Carvalho Queiroz, Nana Matsumoto, and Gary James Blomquist,
"Cuticular hydrocarbons as a tool for the identification of insect species: Puparial cases from Sarcophagidae", Acta Tropica, published
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• Terry Whitworth, Ph.D., http://www.blowflies.net/identification.htm
