Study on the biology of blowfly and the food consumption of blowfly maggots

Abstract

To study the biology of blowfly and the food consumption of blowfly maggots, the present research work was carried out at Entomology research laboratory, The University of Agriculture, Peshawar during 2013. The blowfly (green bottles, blue bottles or carrion flies), is a well known scavenger insects and primary insects commonly utilized to indicate a post-mortem interval. Due to its importance as a death indicator in forensic entomology, a considerable amount of data on its growth and development has been generated. This experiment was conducted in two steps. In step 1, fresh meat was exposed to collect the eggs which were reared and used to study the biology of blowfly. Calculating the age of different life stages of blowfly, hourly developmental data is presented i-e eggs hatched in 16 hours while all the three instars of larvae took 92 hours followed by the pupal stage which was 336 hours. Adult’s life was recorded 192 hours. In this way the total duration was recorded 636 hours. In step 2, to study the food consumption of blowfly maggots, three plastic jars provided each with known amount of meat and 10 active feeding 1 st instar larvae were placed in an incubator at a constant temperature and relative humidity. The average meat consumed by 10 larvae was 19.3 gm and the average meat consumed per larvae was recorded 1.93 gm. This report recommends the study of biology of blowflies on different feeding sources plus growth rates and food consumption rate of blowfly maggots on different body tissues or food sources.