More grave goods: blowflies

While awaiting feedback on last week's draft, I've mostly been collecting references and formatting. But I also went back down to the lab to take some pretty pictures. The entomologist has finished identifying the fly puparia from one of the grave samples: they turned out to be Protophormia terraenovae, the northern blowfly. They eat bodies! It confirms that there really was a body, which isn't exactly groundbreaking but is nice to know.

The entomologist wants to do some high-tech imaging of some of the best preserved puparia later on. But for my project, I decided it would be nice to have some simple photos just to show what they look like. Not many people see blowfly puparia, and even fewer up close. I borrowed a lovely microscope and camera setup from the schistosomiasis people, who use it to photograph the little water snails that carry that nasty nasty parasite. Here are two of the best in the finished figure:

The lower one actually has a little fly face poking out! The two flat discs are its eyes, and the little lumpy bit southwest of them is the proboscis. It looks like it was starting to emerge when it died, because that's the part of the puparium that they hatch out of. I don't know enough about flies to say more than that. But it was quite a surprise!

Blowflies only feed on carcasses, so the puparia can't have just ended up in the soil long after the person was buried. They must have been there from the time of burial. This site is at least 100 years old, possibly 200, making this a very old fly indeed.