A global study of forensically significant calliphorids: implications for identification

A proliferation of molecular studies of the forensically significant Calliphoridae in the last decade has seen molecule-based identification of immature and damaged specimens become a routine complement to traditional morphological identification as a preliminary to the accurate estimation of post-mortem intervals (PMI), which depends on the use of species-specific developmental data. Published molecular studies have tended to focus on generating data for geographically localised communities of species of importance, which has limited the consideration of intraspecific variation in species of global distribution. This study used phylogenetic analysis to assess the species status of 27 forensically important calliphorid species based on 1167 base pairs of the COI gene of 119 specimens from 22 countries, and confirmed the utility of the COI gene in identifying most species. The species Lucilia cuprina, Chrysomya megacephala, Ch. saffranea, Ch. albifrontalis and Calliphora stygia were unable to be monophyletically resolved based on these data. Identification of phylogenetically young species will require a faster-evolving molecular marker, but most species could be unambiguously characterised by sampling relatively few conspecific individuals if they were from distant localities. Intraspecific geographical variation was observed within Ch. rufifacies and L. cuprina, and is discussed with reference to unrecognised species.