Fly Maggots as Bio-Indicators of Warfarin Poisoning in Rabbits as An Animal Model

Abd El-Gawad, Alaa; Kenawy, Mohamed A.; Badawy, Rawda M.; Abd El-Bar, Marah M.

doi:10.21608/eajbse.2020.111132

Fly Maggots as Bio-Indicators of Warfarin Poisoning in Rabbits as An Animal Model

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ Department of Entomology, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University, Abbassyia, Cairo 11566, Egypt

² Department of Entomology, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University, Abbassyia, Cairo 11566, Egypt.

10.21608/eajbse.2020.111132

Abstract

Arthropods collected off the corpse or at a crime scene can be used to determine the presence of toxins in a body at the death time. This study was planned and objected at examining the possible use of fly larvae as indicators for detecting rabbit poisoning with Warfarin rodenticide. For this, Warfarin was examined in blood samples of an intoxicated rabbit carcass and maggots that were collected off such remain using the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography. The blood of the intoxicated rabbit was positive. The maggots showed two different results: (1) Positive that may refer to the feeding of larvae upon the rabbit liver which retains the toxin for 90 days post-mortem and (2) Negative that may be due to that this toxin is highly degraded after 18 hours of ingestion while the maggots started to invade the carcass after 48 hours of death. The controls of both rabbit and maggots were negative. Our results confirmed the reliability of entomological specimens for qualitative analyses of the toxins.

Keywords