Evolutionary Profile of Family Calliphoridae (Diptera) and Expected Future Distribution of Chrysomya bezziana Under Different Climatic Change Scenarios

Abstract

True flies -belonging to order Diptera- are globally familiar due to their world-wide abundance and impacts on humans and their belongings. Family Calliphoridae deemed to pose a central dogma of Dipterous flies. The family is notorious for ecological, veterinary, medical and forensic importance of its members, calliphorids could threaten human health and livestock industries. One of the most interesting and sophisticated relations that seen in nature is myiasis which represents the relation between these tiny small larvae of Diptera and their hosts. This is close enough to render Calliphoridae as a pivotal family due to myiasis lifestyle exerted by several members of it. Deciphering the phylogenetic relationships among calliphorids to characterize the origin of myiasis is considered as a challenge. In chapter two, this is established by constructing a robust phylogenetic tree of desired taxa which revealed the appearance of obligatory myiasis more than five times and supported our hypothesis of that myiasis represents a convergent evolution status occurred millions of years ago. Further, dramatic changes in climate have had a general and dissimilar impacts on biodiversity. Studying these impacts on the Old-World screwworm; (OWS), Chrysomya bezziana, as one of the most important myiasis causing flies that parasitize warm-blooded animals in the Eastern Hemisphere is important. Species distribution modeling techniques like geographic information system (GIS) allowed us to model the current and future global distribution of C. bezziana under changing climate. In chapter three, our results illustrated that temperature was the most important parameter in fly distribution and our models predicted the current and future risk of OWS introduction to several habitat suitable areas.