Question: How does using fly pupae help finding a TSD?

Katherine Davies answered on 17 Mar 2011:

Hi

the same way maggots do. if the corpse has been dead for 1-3 weeks, the eldest stage will be pupae, which should thus be used to determine how long the body has been at the scene. The only difference is how we use each lifecycle stage. for larvae we measure their length, as this is directly proportional to age. with pupae, we correlate their external and internal development to a timeline (of known morphological changes with age). For all stages, we can use gene expression (RNA/DNA) to indicate age also.