Environmental forensic entomology: using carrion arthropods as information sentinels in ecological and forensic...

The use of arthropods in a medicolegal framework is well-known and widely adopted in forensic death investigations. Typically, the life cycle and community composition of carrion arthropods can be used to establish a timeframe of events occurring after the death of an individual. However, because of their unique life strategies (eg the precise detection, location, and exploitation of ephemeral resources) and high dispersal abilities as adults, carrion arthropods can reveal much more information than meets the eye. In recent years, carrion arthropods have revealed important biological and chemical information regarding the substrates that they routinely visit in a natural environment: animal carcasses, feces, microbes, parasites, and even hazardous chemicals. These insects can act as environmental drones, passively acquiring vast amounts of biological and chemical information that can easily be extracted by investigators, given they know what to look for and what methodologies are available for such analyses. This forum piece presents the different ways that carrion arthropods, particularly blow flies, have been used as proxies to assess the health of the local environment and how these methodologies can be leveraged in a forensic context. Further, we propose environmental forensic entomology as an emerging framework and extension of forensic entomology, which currently includes stored products entomology, urban entomology, and medicolegal entomology. Finally, we outline recommendations for future research in this area and propose guidelines for the use of such data in a legal setting.