Journal
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL ENTOMOLOGY
Volume 50, Issue 4, Pages 890-897Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1603/ME12200
Keywords
investigator disturbance; community resilience; repeated sampling
Categories
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Faculte des etudes superieures et de la recherche (FESR)
- Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) [A250]
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Experimental protocols in forensic entomology successional field studies generally involve daily sampling of insects to document temporal changes in species composition on animal carcasses. One challenge with that method has been to adjust the sampling intensity to obtain the best representation of the community present without affecting the said community. To this date, little is known about how such investigator perturbations affect decomposition-related processes. Here, we investigated how different levels of daily sampling of fly eggs and fly larvae affected, over time, carcass decomposition rate and the carrion insect community. Results indicated that a daily sampling of <5% of the egg and larvae volumes present on a carcass, a sampling intensity believed to be consistent with current accepted practices in successional field studies, had little effect overall. Higher sampling intensities, however, slowed down carcass decomposition, affected the abundance of certain carrion insects, and caused an increase in the volume of eggs laid by dipterans. This study suggests that the carrion insect community not only has a limited resilience to recurrent perturbations but that a daily sampling intensity equal to or <5% of the egg and larvae volumes appears adequate to ensure that the system is representative of unsampled conditions. Hence we propose that this threshold be accepted as best practice in future forensic entomology successional field studies.
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