Right, 5-HT immunoreactive cells Chemosensory systems in insects . Chemosensory systems allow organisms to differentially sense and respond to external and internal chemical changes. In insects, both taste and smell are essential for behaviours such as food finding and feeding, egg laying, host acceptance, mate finding, and threat avoidance. My work focuses on the taste system in the sarcophagid flesh fly Neobellaria bullata .
Flesh flies are scavengers, often arriving early at dead carcasses.
Consequently they are particularly important as forensic indicators. They can be serious pests especially where meat and fish are displayed in open markets. Some sarcophagids are also important and insufficiently studied parasitoids of economically important insects such as the forest tent caterpillar. Because they frequent newly killed vertebrates, they are potentially important in disease transmission. Increased knowledge of the taste system of flesh flies, especially since we have shown that taste is essential to larviposition site selection, could have major benefits.