Forensic Entomology Interactive

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Forensic Entomology Interactive
Forensic entomology is an essential tool for legal investigations. The flies or maggots collected from the crime scene help in death investigations since they give insight into several aspects of the death such as the time since death and the manner of death. In the pig in a blanket crime scene video, the forensic entomologist utilizes the lifecycle of flies in bringing murderers to justice.
The pig in the blanket was found rolled in a plastic polythene paper around 5 p.m. The first step is to observe and study the materials left on the plastic bag from the body. The entomologist then collects a large maggot corpus, a number of puparia as well a few damaged adult blowflies identifiable as black blowflies. He collected only a small amount of puparia in comparison to the maggots (Forensic, 1). It is also evident that a majority of the maggots were in the last of the three larva stages. The entomologist also made several environmental observations including the direction of the sunlight and the vegetation where the body dumped. The observations and the insect evidence are taken to the lab for exhaustive analysis and examination.
Estimating a postmortem interval or the time since death is of significant value to the forensic entomologist. The method used to calculate the PMI for this case uses the degree of growth of the oldest maggots that have fed on the body, from which one can approximate a clo…