Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects

by Jonathan Balcombe

Sturgis McKeever

It had long been known that the aptly named frog-eating bat eavesdrops on frog calls to find its prey. On a hunch that midges might be doing the same thing, McKeever broadcast prerecorded frog calls in the field. “He collected bucketloads of the midges,” Borkent told me. By playing recorded frog calls over a trap—a fan blowing into a net—many specimens could be collected in a single evening. On one of their first forays, McKeever and a colleague caught 566 midges in 30 minutes. Suddenly, biologists had a tool—a cassette tape recorder—to collect and document a group of flies that for a century had languished in obscurity. Apparently, the elusive males, which don’t hunt blood, are either deaf or uninterested in frog calls, for the frog-call traps have only ever caught females.

It is not clear by what mechanism midges hear frog calls. A good possibility is that the calls are detected using the Johnston’s organ, a cluster of neurons at the base of the midge’s feathery antennae that respond to deflections of individual hairs.

One estimate finds that a small frog could lose nearly a third of its total blood volume to a high volume of these flies in an hour.

by chorusing in groups the frogs might also be confusing the flies.

Some male frogs refrain from calling altogether,

Other frogs call above 4,000 hertz, beyond the hearing sensitivity of the midges.

When scientists transplanted the city-slicker frogs into rural areas, they lowered their vulnerability to enemies by simplifying their calls, whereas country frogs were unable to jazz up their calls after being transplanted to the city.

these midges and their hosts have been interacting for at least 190 million years.

The core question here is whether DNA was preserved, a hot topic during the time Jurassic Park appeared as a movie. Michael Crichton’s 1990 book, on which the film was based, relied on the premise that DNA could remain viable for eons in the stomach contents of a bloodsucking fly preserved in amber. Disappointingly, it has since been shown that even under ideal conditions DNA completely degrades in one to two million years.

the pain of a horsefly bite is proportional to the fly’s size.

another common winged blood-seeker: the stable fly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_fly

They are devilishly fast; they make the housefly seem sluggish. Their wicked speed and difficulty to swat has been attributed (in part) to the fact that they do not bite by sinking their mouthparts deep into their prey in the manner of mosquitoes. Instead, their saw-tipped bayonet remains near the surface, allowing them to escape in an instant.

However, human studies of heat pain have found that pain sensations are heightened when we are expecting them.

Rocky Mountain bite flies from the snipe-fly family Rhagionidae.

Now, such is my reverence for life that I shy away from killing insects unless I am under persistent attack.

Oh brother

Many bat flies cannot fly, and some are wingless. After all, why bother flying when your winged hosts can do the flying for you. These weird insects can be identified as flies only after detailed examination, as Steve Marshall explains: “Males and newly emerged females are normal-looking fully winged bat parasites, but [a few] females undergo extraordinary transformations once they find their hosts. Upon arrival on an appropriate host the female burrows almost entirely under the bat’s skin, loses her wings and legs, and undergoes extensive bloating of the abdomen so that it envelops the head and thorax. Once encysted under the bat’s skin, the female fly becomes little more than a bloodsucking bag that contains a developing larva; it is hardly recognizable as an insect, let alone a fly.”

sheep ked,

Human DNA profiling from blood collected from engorged mosquitoes is feasible for up to three and a half days after a blood meal.

Fly-imbibed blood is also helpful to wildlife biologists, who have been able to detect the presence of pathogens threatening to wildlife.

Flies prevent habitat and biodiversity loss by curbing the human presence in ecologically sensitive areas. The tsetse fly is a notable example.*

Conservationists sometimes call the fly “the best game warden in Africa.” So vital is the tsetse considered to the preservation of southern African biodiversity that conservationists in South Africa have challenged as unconstitutional a proposal to (try to) eradicate these flies.

Human population densities and the numbers of roads are markedly lower in areas of Scotland where the local biting midge thrives in huge numbers.

What did one fly say to the other? “Pardon me, is this stool taken?”

Consider that the average American produces about 11,400 kilograms (25,000 pounds) of poop in a lifetime. That’s about the weight of three adult hippos. Multiply by a few billion humans for a global extrapolation of about 1.3 trillion kilograms (1.5 billion tons) of human dung per year.*

coprophagous (poop-eating) insects

First, humans go to great lengths to sequester our fecal waste and to process it out of the reach of creatures that might otherwise consume it.

Second, our growing global ecological footprint is causing biodiversity loss, and that means fewer producers of the food that scat-seekers seek.

A typical housefly lays 2 to 7 batches of 50 to 100 small, elongated eggs (25 laid end-to-end equal an inch).

Eggs hatch in 6 to 30 hours.

move to drier locales to pupate.

Different conditions affect the duration of each stage: larval, 3 to 14 days; pupal, 3 to 10 days. An adult’s average life span is 30 days, with a maximum of 70.

Named for an old sense of the verb blow, meaning “to lay eggs,” blowflies are noted for their brilliant metallic colors.

flesh flies do not lay eggs; they give birth to live young, which begin feeding immediately.

most species of flesh flies do not normally colonize dead creatures,

Their cadaverous habits make blowflies and flesh flies members of the necrobiome, the community of interacting organisms whose livelihoods are tied to the process of animal decomposition.

daddy longlegs,

1 daddy longlegs.

The combined digestive enzymes of a team of maggots and the collective effects of their mouth hooks gnawing on the flesh causes rotting meat to break down faster. The maggot mass also generates impressive heat, up to 30°C (54°F) above ambient temperatures—a remarkable feat for “cold-blooded” creatures. Heat is believed to be generated by the friction of all those wriggling grubs, and perhaps also metabolic and microbial activity.

black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens), a species noted for being a champion composter

detritovores

rat-tailed maggots destined to become hoverflies, named for a long snorkel at the tail end that can be telescoped to an incredible 15 centimeters (5.9 inches), allowing them to breathe while churning through wet muck.

larvae feed on decaying vegetable matter

Originating in the New World, these handsome flies, with a pair of longish antennae pointing forward, have spread to all continents and are now virtually cosmopolitan.

A mother black soldier fly bears about 600 babies per litter. Each larva can eat a gram of compost—several times its own weight—per day. No wonder these insect...

AgriProtein has generated a two-for-one strategy, using black soldier larvae to recycle city waste, then as protein-rich feed before they pupate.

South of the border, the American company EnviroFlight, launched in 2009, currently sells four product lines: EnviroBug (whole oven-dried larvae), EnviroMeal (oven-dried larvae pulverized into powder), EnviroOil (oil mechanically pressed out of the dry larvae), and EnviroFrass (production leftovers, including larvae waste, exoskeletons, and remaining feed ingredients). The company’s target markets are fertilizer and feed for poultry, aquaculture, pets, exotic animals (in zoos, for example), and young livestock (pending legalization).

Perhaps it is some consolation to mass-produced soldier flies that several million will be allowed to mature into breeding adults,

Here’s a modern scientific interpretation, courtesy of science journalist Nicholas DeMarino: “Flies rub their limbs together to clean them. This may seem counterintuitive given these insects’ seemingly insatiable lust for filth and grime, but grooming is actually one of their primary activities. It gets rid of physical and chemical detritus and clears up their smell receptors—all of which is important for flying, finding food, courting mates and just about everything that a fly does.”

Fullaway and Krauss calculated that the average housefly carries 1,250,000 bacteria on it. One notably unhygienic individual in their study carried 6,600,000.