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Burn victim identified by maggots on body
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CSI: maggot, as lunching larvae identify victim WHEN Mexican police found a body in the woods it was burned beyond recognition, its DNA too damaged to be used for identification. Luckily, investigators were able to extract DNA from elsewhere — the digestive systems of maggots that had been feeding on the body. This is the first time that human DNA from a maggot
“The investigators extracted DNA from the guts of maggots that had been feeding on the body”
Service in Santa Cruz, California. To keep it that way, NOAA sets fishing quotas according to oceanic temperature, which is thought to influence sardine numbers. That makes the fishery the only one in the world to base quotas on environmental factors. But Sugihara’s analysis of the fishery using CCM suggests the quota system could be improved. NOAA chose to base sardine quotas on ocean temperatures because decades-worth of data seemed to suggest that lower temperatures stunt the sardine population. By the 1990s, though, the effect seemed less strong (Canadian
the population to rise or fall depending on the population size before the temperature change, Sugihara says. That suggests sardines are sometimes vulnerable to collapse even when seas are warmer than the danger threshold. Quotas should be based on predictions of population change, incorporating temperature and other factors. Sugihara is now applying CCM to other fisheries to find out which factors affect which species, and which don’t. Beyond fisheries, the same principles could be used to better understand all manner of systems, he says – including the world economy. n
PHILIPPE PSAILA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
gut has been analysed in this way to successfully identify a victim in a legal case. Police suspected that the body was that of a woman who had been abducted 10 weeks earlier because they found her high-school graduation ring near the crime scene. But when forensic investigators failed to obtain a decent DNA sample from any of the body’s tissues, they –Causality goes both ways with predator and prey – turned to a team of pathologists at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico. the biggest fisheries in the world, Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones, but collapsed in the 1940s. By the Sciences, doi.org/d9q4v5). Marta Ortega-Martínez and their 1980s the sardines had recovered Sugihara’s method suggests why: enough to be harvested stably. it’s the size of the fish populations colleagues dissected three maggot larvae collected from the body and The modern fishery has lasted at the time of the temperature longer than any other, says Alec change that determines the effect. extracted the contents of their gastrointestinal tracts. The human MacCall of the NOAA Fisheries Warm temperatures can cause
DNA they isolated allowed them to determine that the body was female. They then performed a paternity test between this DNA and that of the abducted woman’s father. It revealed a 99.7 per cent chance that she was his daughter (Journal of Forensic Science, doi.org/jdv). Although it is rare for a body to be so damaged that investigators would have to resort to this technique, there are other instances in which the process could be useful, says Jeffrey Wells of Florida International University in Miami. For instance, a maggot found in a car could be used as evidence that the vehicle had been used to transport a particular corpse. The past decade has seen a lot of research on isolating human DNA from insects, says Martin Hall of the Natural History Museum in London, but it has only rarely been used in courts. Last year, DNA from the guts of maggots found on a headless corpse and on a head discovered nearby were used as evidence in a Chinese court that the body parts were from the same person (Tropical Biomedicine, vol 28, p 333). Insects at crime scenes are too often ignored, says Hall. He hopes that the new paper will alert police and pathologists to their potential as crime-fighters. Sara Reardon n
–You are what they eat– 29 September 2012 | NewScientist | 9
CSI: maggot, as lunching larvae identify victim WHEN Mexican police found a body in the woods it was burned beyond recognition, its DNA too damaged to be used for identification. Luckily, investigators were able to extract DNA from elsewhere — the digestive systems of maggots that had been feeding on the body. This is the first time that human DNA from a maggot
“The investigators extracted DNA from the guts of maggots that had been feeding on the body”
Service in Santa Cruz, California. To keep it that way, NOAA sets fishing quotas according to oceanic temperature, which is thought to influence sardine numbers. That makes the fishery the only one in the world to base quotas on environmental factors. But Sugihara’s analysis of the fishery using CCM suggests the quota system could be improved. NOAA chose to base sardine quotas on ocean temperatures because decades-worth of data seemed to suggest that lower temperatures stunt the sardine population. By the 1990s, though, the effect seemed less strong (Canadian
the population to rise or fall depending on the population size before the temperature change, Sugihara says. That suggests sardines are sometimes vulnerable to collapse even when seas are warmer than the danger threshold. Quotas should be based on predictions of population change, incorporating temperature and other factors. Sugihara is now applying CCM to other fisheries to find out which factors affect which species, and which don’t. Beyond fisheries, the same principles could be used to better understand all manner of systems, he says – including the world economy. n
PHILIPPE PSAILA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
gut has been analysed in this way to successfully identify a victim in a legal case. Police suspected that the body was that of a woman who had been abducted 10 weeks earlier because they found her high-school graduation ring near the crime scene. But when forensic investigators failed to obtain a decent DNA sample from any of the body’s tissues, they –Causality goes both ways with predator and prey – turned to a team of pathologists at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in San Nicolás, Mexico. the biggest fisheries in the world, Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic María de Lourdes Chávez-Briones, but collapsed in the 1940s. By the Sciences, doi.org/d9q4v5). Marta Ortega-Martínez and their 1980s the sardines had recovered Sugihara’s method suggests why: enough to be harvested stably. it’s the size of the fish populations colleagues dissected three maggot larvae collected from the body and The modern fishery has lasted at the time of the temperature longer than any other, says Alec change that determines the effect. extracted the contents of their gastrointestinal tracts. The human MacCall of the NOAA Fisheries Warm temperatures can cause
DNA they isolated allowed them to determine that the body was female. They then performed a paternity test between this DNA and that of the abducted woman’s father. It revealed a 99.7 per cent chance that she was his daughter (Journal of Forensic Science, doi.org/jdv). Although it is rare for a body to be so damaged that investigators would have to resort to this technique, there are other instances in which the process could be useful, says Jeffrey Wells of Florida International University in Miami. For instance, a maggot found in a car could be used as evidence that the vehicle had been used to transport a particular corpse. The past decade has seen a lot of research on isolating human DNA from insects, says Martin Hall of the Natural History Museum in London, but it has only rarely been used in courts. Last year, DNA from the guts of maggots found on a headless corpse and on a head discovered nearby were used as evidence in a Chinese court that the body parts were from the same person (Tropical Biomedicine, vol 28, p 333). Insects at crime scenes are too often ignored, says Hall. He hopes that the new paper will alert police and pathologists to their potential as crime-fighters. Sara Reardon n
–You are what they eat– 29 September 2012 | NewScientist | 9