Bugs in Blue

                Some people have a difficult time believing that insects play a major role in the average human's life. Besides the ecologist's rant about the utmost care we must take to maintain balance in the ecosystem lest we take away the one thing that has set our planet apart from the innumerable heavenly bodies throughout the universe (life), what if I were to tell you that bugs help solve murder?
                A class session for my class, Winter Entomology, was spent watching season 1 episode 10 of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation- Sex, Lies, and Larvae". During the episode, three cases are followed and solved: a robbery, a missing (and scandalous) wife, and a murder. The episode begins at the location of the murdered victim. The body is swarming with paper wasps and a specific carrion insect when the body is found. One of the detectives is a forensic entomologist and takes several of these specimens out of the body for further study. Using a made up word to identify the process of determining the time of death through the examination of the carrion insect's larvae size and features, the detective was able to determine not only the time of death but also the relative location of the murder.
                The episode itself was erroneous in many ways. The identified carrion fly's usual was found to be farther east in the country. The forensic entomologist's experiments designed to determine the delay of the growth of fly larvae were flawed. Many more holes in the show's validity were found. However, these errors are justified by the screenwriter's desire to move the story along at a pace that would give the other cases time to be solved coherently. Additionally, the screenwriter wasn't expecting one of the first ten episode of the series to be critically analyzed for entomological purposes.
                Despite the discrepancies in the forensic analysis, insects do in fact help solve murder cases. An insect that has had its life cycle thoroughly examined can help determine the time of death, and in some cases, the location.
               Forensic entomology has been used before this utilization of life cycles was discovered. The earliest case in which forensic entomology helped solve a murder occurred in the fourteenth century. A farmer had been found slashed to death. The local magistrate believed that the person that killed the farmer had used a sickle, so he gathered all of the farmers together with their sickles. All of the sickles were clean as far as the magistrate could see. Within a few minutes, however, flies swarmed around one particular sickle. The flies could sense the blood still on the blade and the murderer confessed.
              While I believe that insects should be given the same respect other kingdoms of Animalia receive simply because life is actually quite rare, the fact insects can be utilized to solve human affairs is by no account something to overlook.

Just to creep out the insectophobic: