First record of Fannia leucosticta (Meigen) (Diptera: Fanniidae) breeding in human corpses

DNA Barcoding Identifies Unknown Females and Larvae of Fannia R.-D. (Diptera: Fanniidae) from Carrion Succession Experiment and Case Report

“…Fanniidae is one of the dipteran families that are attracted to and develop in decomposing animal carrion and human bodies [1][2][3][4][5]. Fanniids can be found at various stages of decomposition and are also known for their ability to exploit both buried remains [6,7] and those restricted to indoor conditions [8,9].…”

“…Fanniids can be found at various stages of decomposition and are also known for their ability to exploit both buried remains [6,7] and those restricted to indoor conditions [8,9]. Under certain circumstances, species of Fanniidae may be utilized as forensic indicators [4,5,8,9]. However, the broad application of Fanniidae for medico-legal purposes is inhibited by the general difficulty of species identification in this family [10] and the absence of information linking females and immature stages to the more rigorously studied adult males.…”

“…Further complicating the identification of female fanniids are two issues; firstly, that some species are described only from males, and secondly females of closely related fanniids (when described) are frequently discriminated based only on a few vague characters, such as minor differences in body coloration or the number or size of fine setae. This is of particular detriment to the forensic utility of fanniids as the majority of adult specimens collected from carrion succession experiments or crime scene are females [1,2,4], and therefore in some cases the adult females are impossible to identify based on morphology alone.…”

“…Animal carrion and dead human bodies have been observed to attract more than 50 species of fanniids worldwide [1-3,14 -16], with 15 species confirmed as developing on cadavers [3,4,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. However, due to taxonomic issues and difficulties in obtaining accurate species identifications, most studies refer only to a few common species of Fannia Robineau-Desvoidy, 1830 (e.g., Fannia canicularis (Linnaeus, 1761), Fannia manicata (Meigen, 1826), Fannia pusio (Wiedemann, 1830) and Fannia scalaris (Fabricius, 1794)) [23,26].…”

Fannia fusconotata and Fannia sanihue (Diptera: Fanniidae): first records in Uruguay and distribution extension

“…Recently 28 new Neotropical species have been described, mainly from Argentina and Colombia (Couri 2004;Couri 2005;Couri and Winagraski 2005;Domín-guez 2007;Domínguez andAballay 2008, 2014;Quiroga and Domínguez 2010;Grisales et al 2012). Adults are small (3-4 mm) usually light grey or dark brown or black; depending on the species the abdomen may be totally black or with yellow spots in the basal area (Velázquez et al 2013). The Fanniidae are believed to be basically inhabitants of forests, and are relatively rare in open landscapes and wetlands (Carvalho et al 2002;Domínguez and Pont 2014).…”