Can maggots help solve crimes?

Maggots – the larval stage of many flies, including the bluebottles and blow flies (Calliphoridae) are feeding machines. And because many of them feed on decomposing material – be it wild animal, domestic animal, or us - they are recyclers.

But this food source is often short lived and so it’s a race to get to the food source before the others arrive to compete for the limited resources.

The mothers have an extraordinary sense of smell and can sniff out a corpse from a long distance, even if that corpse is hidden and as such, we can use them as detectives, as they are often the first to arrive at the scene of a deadly crime.

The use of flies to help us solve crime is millennia old being first written about by the Chinese but modern research has enabled us to determine how quickly the different species of maggots grow in many different situations, such as different ambient conditions or in different locations, and thus they can help us establish the minimum time since death.