{"id":4788,"date":"2011-01-04T12:51:16","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T18:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/?p=4788"},"modified":"2017-05-29T21:42:09","modified_gmt":"2017-05-30T02:42:09","slug":"house-fly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/bug-of-the-week\/house-fly\/","title":{"rendered":"House Fly (Family Muscidae)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Salutations, BugFans,<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s BOTW, starring the ubiquitous house fly, is rated NftFoH (Not for the Faint of Heart). There\u2019s a tremendous amount of material available about house flies (450,000 internet hits in 0.23 seconds). The BugLady will try to hit the high\/low spots.<\/p>\n

House Flies<\/h3>\n

Status: \u201cThey\u2019re everywhere, they\u2019re everywhere!\u201d If, anyplace in the world, a fly is conspicuously sharing your house (cluster flies tend to be more secretive), it\u2019s probably a house fly. House flies (Musca domestica<\/em>) may have originated in the Middle East, and they\u2019ve been around for at least 65 million years. One source suggests that house flies arrived in the Americas with, or even before, Columbus (with Brendon the Irish monk in AD 550? The Vikings in AD 1000? Madoc the Welsh prince in AD 1170? The Basques in AD 1200? Or—according to one author—with the Chinese in AD 1421?) Given a choice, house flies pick warmer climes (with temperatures up to 100 degrees) over colder climes; in colder climes, they survive with the assistance of humans.<\/p>\n

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House flies are the image that pops into most minds when the word \u201cfly\u201d is uttered. Built on the basic fly chassis, they are dark, a quarter to a third of an inch long (females are larger than males), hairy, and sturdy, with two clear flying wings and two knob-like vestigial wings (halteres<\/em>) which help a fly keep its balance in flight. Adults have a dark thorax decorated with 4 darker stripes, and the male\u2019s abdomen is orange-ish. Each of their wine-red compound eyes (with which they can see motion, but not the color red) is made up of about 4,000 lenses. Their antennae help them detect air movement and odors. They can fly at speeds of 4.5 mph\u2014brisk walking speed for us—and most live within a mile or two of where they were hatched.<\/p>\n

What do they do for a living? OK, here\u2019s where things get a little dicey. House flies have \u201csponging\/vacuum-cleaner\u201d mouthparts (some flies, like deer flies, add piercing to their mouth-parts repertoire). The food of adults is described delicately as \u201cmoist, decaying organic matter\u201d and includes decaying plant material along with all manner of liquefied bodily by-products. They are especially fond of sugars and proteins. In service of the \u201cliquefied\u201d part, they \u201cpre-digest\u201d solid food by spitting\/vomiting some of their previous meal on it and then sucking the softened mess up again. House flies walk on their food, spit on their food, and poop on their food, and then they fly away and repeat the process on another food source. Or your hot dog bun.<\/p>\n

Their love life does not inspire ballads. In order to produce eggs, a female needs a good protein meal and a guy (in that order). After minimal courtship, she mates only once, stores sperm for the future, and may lay several batches of eggs over the next few weeks (she can produce up to 500 eggs). Poop and garbage are her favored repositories for her eggs. Poop and garbage are what her kiddos eat. The larvae\/maggots are white and legless.<\/p>\n

After about a week of feeding, the larvae\/maggots pupate. Adults live for two to four weeks after they emerge. When you see an especially small house fly, it\u2019s one that didn\u2019t get enough to eat as a maggot. It\u2019s stunted, and it won\u2019t grow any more as an adult. Since they can squeeze their whole life cycle into as little as one or two weeks, house flies can pull off 12 generations a year here in God\u2019s Country and 20 near the equator.<\/p>\n

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The larvae, because of their relative immobility, are described as \u201cmedically harmless.\u201d Though the adults feed on similar substrates they are, because of their mobility, considered serious pests capable of spreading parasites like tapeworms, and major diseases like TB, anthrax, salmonella, polio, cholera, viral hepatitis, and typhoid fever (but hey, they don\u2019t bite!). This pretty much explains their status on World Health Organization Most-Wanted posters. They pick up \u201cgerms\u201d from the surfaces they walk on, and transfer them to their mouth and body surfaces during the process of grooming. Fly-borne diseases are not common in the U.S. but are a huge deal in countries where cattle and other hoofed animals wander freely and leave their calling cards and where sanitary systems are primitive.<\/p>\n

There is no end to the ingenuity displayed in the control of house flies\u2014an endless variety of fly traps, fly paper, pheromone-baited fly traps, light traps and zappers, and an array of chemicals, both adulticides and larvicides have been deployed (flies quickly develop mutations that make them immune to the chemicals, but humans don\u2019t). but, in the cause of disease prevention, cleanliness is next to godliness, and good sanitation measures trump most other schemes. The cleaner your community is, the cleaner its flies. In addition, a whole slew of animals eat or parasitize house flies, including birds, amphibians, spiders, dragonflies, and the black dump fly, a house fly look-alike whose maggots eat their cousins.<\/p>\n

The modern fly swatter was invented in 1905 by Frank H. Rose, a Kansas schoolteacher inspired by the anti-house fly efforts of Dr. Samuel J. Crumbine. Rose attached a piece of screen to a yardstick and called it a \u201cfly bat.\u201d Dr. Crumbine renamed it the fly swatter to fit with his \u201cSwat the Fly\u201d campaign (he also lead \u201cBat the Rat\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t Spit on the Sidewalk\u201d crusades). For two vintage 1912 anti-fly propaganda pieces, go to Wikipedia<\/a>. In the “external links” section at the bottom of the page, click on:<\/p>\n