Contribution to the knowledge of flesh flies (Diptera: Sarcophagidae: Sarcophaginae) attracted to carcasses in Piura, Peru

Despite being the most diverse family of flies found in carcasses and corps in the Neotropical Region, Sarcophagidae is still underestimated in Peru. This research was developed in the Department of Piura, Northern Peru and we identify the flesh flies captured on two kinds of animal carcasses: dog and guinea pigs. As a result, a new record was documented for Peru: Blaesoxipha (Gigantotheca) plinthopyga (Wiedemann, 1830) and eight new records for the Department of Piura.


INTRODUCTION
Sarcophagidae is a family of flies, commonly called "flesh flies", that are distributed globally, comprising 173 genera and more than 3,000 species (Pape et al., 2011). The females are ovoviviparous multilarviparous, that is, they deposit many first instar larvae directly on the substrate (Meier et al., 1999). This habit of larviposition constitutes an adaptive advantage against other early colonizers flies as Calliphoridae or Muscidae (Barros et al., 2008). Adults are 5 to 20 mm long, dull gray in color with three longitudinal black stripes on mesonotum, a row of meral setae, and subscutellum undeveloped (Carvalho & Mello-Patiu, 2008).
Sarcophagidae has great forensic importance because they are pioneering flies in colonizing human and animal carcasses, along with Calliphoridae and Muscidae (Oliveira-Costa & Mello-Patiu, 2004;Santos, 2018). Although sarcophagids are the most diverse flies found in carcasses and corpses in the Neotropical region (Alves et al., 2014), studies on association of flesh flies and carcass decomposition are still rare. One of the limiting factors is the taxonomic difficulty presented by the group, whose specific identification is mainly based on features of the male terminalia complex (Santos, 2018). Even so, the few records of Sarcophagidae associated with animal carcasses have been made mainly on pigs carcasses, as it is the most internationally accepted biomodel (Jagmahender & Sharma, 2008), since it allows extrapolating information to cases of human corpses, because of their similarity with the cadaveric decomposition (Tomberlin et al., 2011;Schoenly et al., 2006), with the association of arthropods and their succession along the decomposition process (Matuszewski et al., 2019).
In Peru, there are one study of Sarcophagidae fauna of Flores & Dale (1995), but without a forensic focus. Also, "The World Catalog of Sarcophagidae" by Pape (1996) compiles data from the literature and summarizes the record of 109 species from Peru. However, catalog information does not allow identifying which species are attracted by carcasses and which have possible forensic importance for the region. Both Lopes (1969) and Pape (1996) catalogs recorded only five species from Piura, as their type-localities, and no other record has been documented for this region over the past 50 years. For this reason, this work is important for the update of the records of the Sarcophagidae fauna attracted to carcasses in Department of Piura, Northern Peru.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
Adult Sarcophaginae were collected, between years 2017-2019, on mammal carcasses: guinea pig and dog. Specimens were preserved in 70% ethanol and species identification was carried out in the Laboratory of Neotropical Diptera of the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (MNRJ), based ISSN On-Line: 1807-0205 ISSN Printed: 0031-1049 ISNI: 0000-0004-0384-1825 on taxonomic keys and comparison with specialized literature (Carvalho & Mello-Patiu, 2008;Buenaventura et al., 2009;Vairo et al., 2011;Buenaventura & Pape, 2013;Camargo et al., 2018). Due to the taxonomic difficulty for identifying females of this group, only males were identified. The classification followed that proposed by Pape (1996) and the voucher specimens were deposited in the Entomological Collection of MNRJ.
The collected species are presented as a listing, furnishing the worldwide and the Peruvian distribution, bibliographic references, as well as comments on previous records in animal carcasses. The examined material was registered in the following order: DEPARTMENT -Province, District, Town, altitude in meters (geographic coordinates), collection date, type of carcass, number of ♂, Collector. The new records from Piura Department are indicated with an asterisk (*), while the new records from Peru are indicated with a cross ( †).

RESULTS
A total of 18 male specimens were obtained and five genera and nine species were identified, all belonging to the subfamily Sarcophaginae (Diptera: Sarcophagidae). Eight species are new records for Piura, and Blaesoxipha (Gigantotheca) plinthopyga is also a new record for Peru.

Distribution in Peru:
Lima (Flores & Dale, 1995). This is a new record for Piura.

DISCUSSION
In this study, we found nine species were attracted by two kinds of mammal carcasses in the region of Piura, Peru. Lopes (1969) and Pape (1996) catalogued five species for Piura: Argoravinia aurea (Townsend), Argoravinia rufiventris (Wiedemann), Peckia (Peckia) auribarbata (Townsend), Ravinia aurigena (Townsend), and Tricharaea (Sarcophagula) peruana (Townsend). Of these previously reported species, only one is recorded in the present study: Argoravinia rufiventris, with the remaining eight species representing the first records for this region and one of them the first record for Peru.
Very few surveys on Sarcophagidae had been carried out in Peru, one of them was that of Flores & Dale (1995), who revealed species collected in an ecological study using traps baited with meat, excrement and fruit. Lopes (1975Lopes ( , 1992) studied interesting material from Peru collected by Dr. C. Korytkowski and described three new genera and six new species. Lopes (1969) cataloged 35 Sarcophaginae species from Peru and later Pape (1996) compiled 109 species of this subfamily recorded from this country, mainly based on taxonomic studies. Few recent studies in Peru on insects attracted or associated with animal carcasses have mentioned the family Sarcophagidae (Huchet & Greenberg, 2010;Gines et al., 2015;Medina-Achín et al., 2018;Andrade-Herrera et al., 2018;Andrade-Herrera & Marchiori, 2019), but they were unable to determine the species due to the taxonomic difficulty of this group. However, it is necessary to increase the studies on this family of dipterans, as they present a great diversity of life habits and great species richness in South America (Pape, 1996), especially in Peru where their knowledge is underestimated.
The subfamily Sarcophaginae includes mostly sarcosaprophagous species, i.e., those which the larvae feed on or breed in decomposing organic matter (Mello-Patiu et al., 2014b). Some species explore small invertebrate carcasses, other species explore vertebrate feces, some others can be found in vertebrate carcasses (Barros et al., 2008;Ledo et al., 2012;Mello-Patiu et al., 2014a;Farrell et al., 2015;Lopes et al., 2018;Andrade-Herrera et al., 2020) and others may even act as myiasis-causing flies in man and others animals (Calderón-Arguedas et al., 2004;Hagman et al., 2005;Medina et al., 2009;Mello-Patiu & Luna-Dias, 2010). On the other hand, the larviposition habit of these species constitutes an adaptive advantage related to the faster colonization of carcasses than the oviparous species belonging to Calliphoridae (Barros et al., 2008). All of these characteristics give them medical and forensic importance and allow them to be used as tools for determining the post-mortem interval (IPM) (Sharma et al., 2015).

AUTHORS' CONTRIBUTIONS: KNAH: Conceptualization,
Resources, Writing -original draft, Visualization, Investigation; CAMP: Data curation; KNAH, CAMP: Methodology, Writing -review & editing. All authors actively participated in the discussion of the results, they reviewed and approved the final version of the paper.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST:
Authors declare there are no conflicts of interest.

FUNDING INFORMATION:
KNAH thanks to the Universidad Nacional de Piura for co-financing your stay at the Museum Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. CAMP is grateful to FAPERJ (Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Rio de Janeiro) for financial support (Proc. E26-200.078/2019) and to CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) for Research grant (Proc. 308951/2018-2).