Ants and forensic entomology

Original at Ant-maps.com | Ants can help crime investigators with solving a crime. They will tell you if there are small remains from the victim on the murder weapon. But the insects on a decomposing body tell so much more. The insects and maggots tell for example when the victim died and even under what circumstances the body was left. A body found in the dessert with maggots of houseflies on it tells you that something is not right. Houseflies cannot survive in the dessert. They live in urban areas.

And ants? Can ants help solving crimes? In CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode Grave Danger (2005) the crime investigator Nick Stokes played by George Eads is buried alive. The criminal installed a web cam in the coffin and sent the crime investigators from Nick's team to a website where the movie was played. At the end the forensic entomologist Gil Grissom discovers fire ants in the coffin. Because one of the suspects lived on a farm where these ants live the grave could be discovered in time.

But are ants really that helpful? When ants are seen on a crime scene, the investigator must take a note on the investigation form. Not because the ant is evidence, but because ants can destroy evidence. Ants clean everything they find on their path. This does also mean they clean bodies and blood stains. There are cases reported that ants did eat from a body so much that it was hard to measure the victims biomass. In another case ants removed evidence. There are even cases that ants produced an acid on bodies that suggested that the victim was abused.

But not all ants do harm the crime investigations. There is an ant species that only lives in buildings in Washington, D.C. When you find these ants or eggs they will tell you about the place where the victim was or died. Other ants do live in the bones of a body, but entomologists discovered that those ants live there for only two or three years. This fact can tell you something about the time a body was buried. In one case ants (Lasius fuliginous) helped to get an conviction: the ant-stains on the victim and on the boots of a suspect where simular.