Blow Fly Facts

• Location: Preferring temperate to tropical areas,.
• Scientific name: Calliphoridae
• Species: The Calliphoridae family includes carrion flies, cluster flies, greenbottle and bluebottle flies in the Diptera order of insects.
• Color: Often shiny with metallic-like blue, green, orange or black bodies.

Blow Fly Behavior

Noisy in flight, blow flies also have bristle-like hairs that differentiate members of the Calliphoridae family. With the ability to smell dead animal matter as far as a mile away, blow flies are usually the first insects to come into contact with carrion.

Since female blow fly are on a mission to deposit eggs as soon as possible and often seek out dead bodies to do so, blow flies can play an important role in forensics. Because traditional time of death estimations are unreliable after 72 hours, crime scene investigators turn to forensic entomologists to determine approximate times of death through analyzing blow fly and other carrion feeding insect larvae development.