Using DNA-barcoding to make the necrobiont beetle family Cholevidae accessible for forensic entomology

The beetle family Cholevidae (Coleoptera: Staphylinoidea), sometimes viewed as the subfamily Cholevinae of the Leiodidae, consists of some 1700 species worldwide. With the exception of specialized cave-dwelling species and species living in bird and mammal nests and burrows, the species are generalized soil-dwellers that, at least in temperate regions, are mostly found on vertebrate cadavers. Although they have been regularly reported from human corpses, and offer potential because of many species’ peak activity in the cold season, they have not been a focus of forensic entomologists so far. This is probably due to their small size and the difficulty in identifying the adults and their larvae. In this paper, we show that DNA-barcoding can help make this group of necrobiont beetles available as a tool for forensic research. We collected 86 specimens of 20 species of the genera Catops, Fissocatops, Apocatops, Choleva, Nargus, Ptomaphagus, and Sciodrepoides from the Netherlands and France and show that a broad “barcoding gap” allows almost all species to be easily and unambiguously identified by the sequence of the “barcoding gene” cytochrome c oxidase I (COI). This opens up the possibility of adding Cholevidae to the set of insect taxa routinely used in forensic entomology.