We used seven baited boxes with different combinations of access holes and odor diffusion surfaces to study the arrival of necrophagous flies. During laboratory experiments, 30 gravid Lucilia sericata females were kept in a chamber with one of the boxes. The box with the largest odor diffusion surface (99 cm(2)) combined with the lowest accessibility (one 1 cm(2) entrance hole) was entered leas...

Homicide investigations often depend on the determination of a minimum post mortem interval (PMI) by forensic entomologists. The age of the most developed insect larvae (mostly blowfly larvae) gives reasonably reliable information about the minimum time a person has been dead. Methods such as Isomegalen-Diagrams or ADH-calculations have problems in their reliability, so we established in this s...

The relative antibacterial activities of excretion/secretion (ES) from two carrion-feeding insects, Calliphora vicina Robineau-Desvoidy and Dermestes maculatus DeGeer, and a detritivore, Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus, were compared to that of Lucilia sericata Meigen, a species with ES of known antibacterial capacity, in order to explore the antimicrobial potential of other carrion and detritivore s...

Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) is widely used for debridement of chronic infected wounds; however, for wounds harbouring specific bacteria limited effect or failure of the treatment has been described. Here we studied the survival of Lucilia sericata maggots encountering Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 in a simple assay with emphasis on the quorum-sensing (QS)-regulated virulence. The maggots wer...

1. Locating an optimal oviposition site can be a challenging task for female insects, especially when dealing with patchy, unpredictable and ephemeral food source such as carrion. Understanding the biotic abiotic parameters that influence behaviour of necrophagous flies is not just great biological importance but also essential their application in legal investigations. 2. In this study, we mon...

Forensic entomologists use blow fly development to estimate a postmortem interval. Although accurate, fly age estimates can be imprecise for older developmental stages and no standard means of assigning confidence intervals exists. Presented here is a method for modeling growth of the forensically important blow fly Lucilia sericata, using generalized additive models (GAMs). Eighteen GAMs were ...

Necrophagous fly is the most common insect evidence collected during a death investigation. We analyzed the DNA polymorphism among the five forensically important fly species, namely, Lucilia sericata, Aldrichina grahami, Chrysomya megacephala, Parasarcophaga crassipalpis and Musca domestica using inter simple sequence repeat (ISSR) method. Nine ISSR primers selected from 18 primers could ampli...

Transformer (TRA) promotes female development in several dipteran species including the Australian sheep blowfly Lucilia cuprina, the Mediterranean fruit fly, housefly and Drosophila melanogaster. tra transcripts are sex-specifically spliced such that only the female form encodes full length functional protein. The presence of six predicted TRA/TRA2 binding sites in the sex-specific female intr...