Timing of oviposition on a corpse is a key factor in entomologically based minimum postmortem interval (mPMI) calculations. However, there is considerable variation in nocturnal oviposition behavior of blow flies reported in the research literature. This study investigated nocturnal oviposition in central England for the first time, over 25 trials from 2011 to 2013. Liver-baited traps were plac...

In insects, the first extraction of motion and direction clues from local brightness modulations is thought to take place in the medulla. However, whether and how these computations are represented in the medulla stills remain widely unknown, because electrical recording of the neurons in the medulla is difficult. As an effort to overcome this difficulty, we employed local electroporation in vi...

Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) is the use of the larval stage of flies (i.e., Calliphoridae) to remove necrotic tissue and disinfect wounds. Effective MDT requires aseptic technique to prevent the unintentional introduction of pathogenic bacteria into a wound to be debrided; yet the external surface of Calliphoridae eggs is often heavily contaminated with bacteria. Studies of external disinfe...

We describe 2 patients with severe orbital myiasis due to Cochliomyia hominivorax (of the order Diptera and the family Calliphoridae) who had underlying skin carcinomas and were treated with oral ivermectin and debridement. We suggest that ivermectin plays an important role in the treatment of severe cases of myiasis.

Toxicological analyses on a putrefied cadaver are sometimes difficult to achieve, due to the absence of blood and/or urine. In this study, morphine and phenobarbital were simultaneously identified and assayed in several tissues of a putrefied cadaver and in the fly larvae of Calliphoridae found on the corpse.

BACKGROUND The genotype-phenotype interactions among traits governing feeding preference are of fundamental importance to behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology. The genetic basis of behavioral traits has been explored in different taxa using different approaches. However, the complex nature of the genetic mechanisms undergirding behavior is poorly understood. Here, we present an evolutio...

Electrophysiological recordings are often performed in animals which require significant preparation and training. The blowfly, on the other hand, is a readily accessible model for this technique because of its large size and characterized cells. One of these cells in particular, H1, is known to respond preferentially to horizontal visual movement (Eckert, 1980). The goal of this project was to...

The occurrence of dipteran fly, Chrysomyamegacephala (Fabricius, 1794) is reported for the first time from Royapuram fishing harbour (Chennai), Tamil Nadu, South East India. The fully grown third instar larvae of Chrysomyamegacephala were collected from decaying fishes near Royapuram fishing harbour. This site is found to be the regular breeding site for Chrysomyamegacephala. Larvae were reared...

Blowflies use discrete, ephemeral substrates for larval development. After exhaustion of the food supply, larvae will disperse in search of sites to burrow and pupate or will seek other sources of food in a process known as post-feeding larval dispersal. In this study, the effect of temperature was investigated as it is one of the most important aspects of the environmental variables in this pr...

Neurons sensitive to visual motion change their response properties during prolonged motion stimulation. These changes have been interpreted as adaptive and were concluded, for instance, to adjust the sensitivity of the visual motion pathway to velocity changes or to increase the reliability of encoding of motion information. These conclusions are based on experiments with experimenter-designed...