A bug that doesn’t belong in the local environment likely came from somewhere else. All of that can take place.” He says the investigators use this “circumstantial information” to draw conclusions about “what happened to that person to cause death.” They may also be able to tell if a body was moved or disturbed based on the insects present. “What that means is: What would be the circumstances that would lead an insect to be attracted to colonize the body? That could be death, it also could be neglect or abuse, it could be colonization before death. F.L.I.E.S.) at Texas A&M University, prefers to talk about time of colonization rather than time of death.

Jeffery Tomberlin, director of the Forensic Laboratory for Investigative Entomological Science (a.k.a. “So if I say the insects have been on the body for at least seven days, that indicates the person has been dead for at least seven days.” This is called the postmortem interval-the time since death has occurred. This gives her an estimate of how long the insects have been on the body, which she submits in a report to the police. This takes quite some time.” If the insect samples are eggs, it could take as long as a month. Gail Anderson, co-director of the Centre for Forensic Research at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, says that of the insect samples she collects, “half of them I will keep preserved so they can be produced in court years later, and the rest I will raise through to adulthood to identify them. This lifecycle is illuminating for forensic entomologists, who collect insect samples from a body.

After feeding, the maggots crawl off to find a place to pupate underground.

They lay eggs on rotting flesh so that when larvae hatch, they have a ready food supply. THEY CAN USE INSECTS TO INFER TIME OF DEATH, AMONG OTHER THINGS.īlow flies are often the first insects to appear on the scene. Predacious insects also come to feed on these bugs, which can offer a secondary set of clues. They’re attracted by volatile molecules called apeneumones that are released by bacterial activity as a body starts to decompose. (Think of the swarms you’ve seen hovering above roadkill.)Īll of them share something in common: an ability to sniff out death soon after it occurs, often in minutes. With more than a thousand species, the Calliphoridae family of flies goes by a lot of names, including blow flies, carrion flies, bluebottles, greenbottles, and cluster flies.

But flies are the most avid flesh-eaters-especially those in the Sarcophagidae and Calliphoridae families. One recent study even found a caterpillar munching on human skin. Many insect species practice necrophagy, including the aptly named carrion beetles (family Siphidae), skin beetles (Dermestidae), and bone beetles (Cleridae).

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