Computer Modeling of Insect Growth and Its Application to Forensic Entomology

摘要

It is obvious that temperature is of critical importance to insect development, and much research has been devoted to this area. Developmental theories, mathematical equations, and even computer simulations of insect growth have all been created and published within the relevant literature. However, the use and application of computer modeling in forensic entomology is largely unexplored. The reason for this is that many widely used entomological computer models do not provide acceptable results for predicting development times of insect field populations under variable temperature (Stinner et al. I974), and this is a critical drawback for forensic applications. The only published accounts of established statistical protocol or computer simulation of the arthropod fauna inhabiting carrion is by Schoenly (1992), and Schoenly et al. (1992). Schoenly et al. (1992) developed a computer algorithm in the BASIC language to calculate the postmortem interval from arthropod succession data. The required input for this program is the identity of arthropod taxa recovered from the death scene, data on carrion-associated arthropod taxa, known succession patterns, and data on developmental duration of the immature stages.