My STEP Signature Project focused on rearing various flies that have forensic importance to create a dichotomous key of their larval features to be used in identification. This involved rearing flies and collecting specimens daily, alongside photographing each stage and providing a description.
When I first came to college I wanted to pursue forensic entomology, but I was told by one too many people that it wouldn’t be possible, and OSU simply couldn’t provide a space for me to learn the skills needed. With this in mind, I put forensics on the back plate, choosing to focus on conservation, something that felt safe to me as conservation is what I had focused my high school career on. Forensics felt very distant from me, but I still found myself being drawn back to it at every opportunity I could. That is when I began discussing forensics with Dr. Ellen Klinger, who taught my Pests & Plagues course in the Fall of my Sophomore year. Part of this course involved learning aspects of forensics, and my passion was reignited.
Pursuing forensics was something that I had come into college wanting to do, only for that dream to be covered up, but through my STEP Signature Project, that dream has come to life again, with more logistical applications in mind. My view of what a career in forensics looks like has changed drastically from working purely with cadavers to working with more common insects and the importance of a strong entomological knowledge to even begin working in forensic entomology.
The activities that led to my change were primarily seen in the preparation of the fly rearing stage. This project was entirely run by myself; my advisor had never previously worked with flies in forensics, and we were both starting from zero, so almost all decisions relied on my personal research/readings. The major key aspects of this project that had the most impact are preparation, adjusting the experiment, and connecting with those in this field. The preparation for this project required heavy amounts of academic literature reviews in order to learn about the rearing process and what design would work best with the size requirements and overall goals of this project.
A vital skill that this project taught me was to be flexible and able to adjust your experiment when it goes wrong the first couple of times. When I was raising the first generation of maggots, I had a lot of trouble with escapees within the incubator. This resulted in me having to revisit the drawing board for the larval containers time and time again, until I finally got it right. Similarly, I had to keep adjusting the enclosures for the adults, as they were also escaping when I was attempting to change their food sources.
Lastly, through this project, I am now working with a group of researchers out in Arizona developing a dichotomous key with my images, and I am becoming fully integrated into this field that felt so distant only a year ago. I have expanded my network in ways that I didn’t think were possible through meeting and talking with others performing similar research. These conversations made me feel more welcomed into an academic setting than I have felt over my three years of college.
This change is significant to my life because it has altered my career path as a whole. Without it, I very likely would have fully given up on the possibility of having forensic entomology be a part of my life. This project has opened a whole new world of academics for me and has helped me solidify my ultimate career goals and the steps I can take to get there. This project overall also reassured me that I do enjoy completing academic work, which was a huge mental block for me when I was first considering going to graduate school to receive a PhD.
Pregnant female C. vinca fly
Peritreme development in a late 3rd instar C. vinca larvae