Computer Modeling of Insect Growth and Its Application to Forensic Entomology

To provide better customer service, NCJRS has made this Federally-funded grant final report available electronically in addition to traditional paper copies. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those Introduction It is obvious that temperature is of critical importance to insect development, and much research has been devoted to this area. Developmental theories, mathematical equations, and even computer simulations of insect growth have all been created and published within the relevant literature. However, the use and application of computer modeling in forensic entomology is largely unexplored. The reason for this is that many widely used entomological computer models do not provide acceptable results for predicting development times of insect field populations under variable temperature (Stinner et al. I974), and this is a critical drawback for forensic applications. The only published accounts of established statistical protocol or computer simulation of the arthropod fauna inhabiting carrion is by Schoenly (1 992), and Schoenly et al. (1992). Schoenly et al. (1 992) developed a computer algorithm in the BASIC language to calculate the postmortem interval from arthropod succession data. The required input for this program is the identity of arthropod taxa recovered from the death scene, data on carrion-associated arthropod taxa, known succession patterns, and data on developmental duration ofthe immature stages. Schoenly (1 992) also developed a set of statistical protocols proposed for .' analyzing carrion-arthropod succession in forensic entomological investigations. This protocol analyzed data in three ways: I) Patterns of arthropod visitation (arthropods divided into reoccurring or non-reoccurring taxa); 2) Temporal changes in taxonomic U.S. Department of Justice. of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those 3 composition of the carrion-arthropod community; and 3) Applying sampled random tests (Monte Carlo simulation) to community wide arthropod visitation times. Most published computer assisted entomological techniques use succession (= species replacement) timetables of certain taxa to estimate the upper and lower limits of the postmortem interval in days. Williams (1 984) published a model for aging fly larvae in which a method is described for determining …