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Transcript: Information from Insects
Dr. Gail Anderson: Insects are the first witnesses to the crime. They arrive immediately after death, within minutes or seconds. Insects are going to get there pretty much immediately. And they're attracted not really for their own selves, they’re attracted to lay their eggs. They lay their eggs on that body and those eggs hatch into maggots and those maggots feed on the body and develop through their life cycle. If we look at the insects on the body and we look at the life cycle and we determine what species they are, we can work out how old the oldest maggots are. If the oldest maggots on the body are say seven days old, it tells us that there have been maggots on this body for seven days. So he has been dead, he’s been a dead body for at least seven days. That gives a minimum elapsed time since death.
