Climate change Blowflies can hamper murder investigations
According to a study, blowflies, which are now also found in Central Europe due to climate change, can make it more difficult to solve crimes. Its presence makes the work of forensic scientists more difficult, as it is harder for them to assess how long a cadaver has been there.
16.10.2024, 13:57
SDA
They eat other maggots on carcasses or influence the development time of insect larvae, said cadaver ecologist Christian von Hoermann from the University of Würzburg. It is important for forensic scientists to know where the blowfly occurs. Insects on corpses can be an important aid in murder investigations. Hundreds of insect species populate the dead body - and provide experts with a multitude of traces.
The larvae of certain flies and beetles are particularly important. Experts can use the insect infestation to determine how long corpses have been lying in a certain place - or whether they have previously been in a different place, with different characteristics and then also different insect species.
Von Hoermann had set up a research project in the Šumava National Park in the Czech Republic. For more than two months, the scientists observed the decomposition of a bison carcass. This was the first time that blowflies had been discovered in the national park. Previously, findings were only known from warmer regions in southern Europe, the Orient and tropical regions.
For the project, von Hoermann and his colleagues analyzed images from camera traps, collected insects using cup traps buried in the ground and recorded fungi and bacteria using oral swabs. "The large dead animal biomass allows a very high number of individuals to visit the carrion, which in turn has a positive effect on the number of species recorded and thus on the conservation and promotion of biodiversity," says the researcher.
