Ant medos reflection

Anthony Semedo 10/7/2014

Forensic Entomology,the use of insects to find out a accurate time of death in any case dealing with death.Our forensics class testing how a forensic entomologist would do this on September 8th 2014.We had gone down to the Blackstone River and placed a freshly cut pork shoulder near the water, also setting up a cage around it to not allow any other animals from tampering with our experiment.The purpose of this being to get a accurate time of death with the insects collected from the pork shoulder over time, and finding out how a entomologist provides evidence to cases.

Following up on this experiment the class had gone down to the river every time we met to collect insects and check on visual differences on our pork shoulder.On the first day of checking up on the pork shoulder we had immediately noticed insects such as blowflies,hairy maggot flies,wasps and blue bottle flies.September 10th 2014 , the 2nd time we had gone to check on the pork shoulder we had noticed lots of changes in our pork shoulder.Things such as color change , the shoulder had become a dark purple color and there had noticeable wounds or even holes in the shoulder clearly displaying maggots that had been in the shoulder.September 17th 2014, our last day of this experiment.Going down to the river we had noticed that the smell of the shoulder had become stronger than what it had  ever been and large portions or chunks of our shoulder had been gone showing the bones in our shoulder.Collecting maggots and papaes from the shoulder to give us an accurate PMI(post mortem interval) or time of death of our shoulder.Also calculating things such as the ADD(accumulated degree day) & ADH(accumulated degree hour) to see if we would get a accurate or close time to when we had placed our pork shoulder by the river.

Our calculated time being very close to our published time or time that we had put the shoulder outside.This telling us the importance of Forensic Entomology and how insects can help solve cases.Wherever there is a dead body there is insects that are very reliable and that can help get unknown information which can lead to a conviction of the correct suspect in any case with a accurate PMI.