Species Of The Week Number 41: Housefly
The Housefly is magnificently successful, maybe the most successful insect in the world. You can find them breaking down organic matter, walking upside down and being generally annoying right across the globe.
If you have one buzzing around the good news is it's only going to live for two weeks. The bad news is females will lay around 500 eggs in that time and, 3 weeks later, 500 more flies will emerge. The adult flies then only take 24 hours to reach sexual maturity and the process starts all over again.
In addition to being annoying they can also carry diseases, and are very happy spreading typhoid, cholera, salmonella, dysentery, tuberculosis and anthrax around parts of the globe, when they put their minds to it. So don't leave your food out.
Luckily Houseflies are susceptible to a few nasty conditions themselves and have quite a few predators including spiders. I even knew an old lady who swallowed a fly.
But in 1958 spiders and hungry old ladies weren't enough for the Chinese who initiated a nationwide campaign to eliminate all Houseflies - as well as all the rats, mosquitos and sparrows (I've no idea what they had against the sparrows). It didn't work and the flies, and the other creatures, won.
In the absence of such a campaign in Meanwood you could try swatting them.
They are quite hard to swat for a reason. Compared to humans, they can effectively see in slow motion. Time doesn't fly for flies, it is the reverse. It is all due to a thing called the Flicker Fusion Threshold - its the same science that determines the frame rate on a movie which makes you think you are watching something in continual motion.
Not only that, but Houseflies have big compound eyes - so they can ALWAYS see you coming.
Maybe American poet Ogden Nash summed it up best in his two line poem:
"God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why"
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