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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 06/26/2005 : 14:44:31
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This is about an animal that we are all familiar, too familiar some might say, and I am again, rather casually observing them at work. It's pretty amazing.
It has the charming, Latin name of Calliphora vomitoria but we mostly call it the blue-bottle fly.
The blue-bottles buzzing around your garbage, and how the hell did they get in here, are females looking for a place to lay their eggs. They prefer meat just beginning to rot, but will settle for anything dead. These eggs hatch in 2 to 4 days and the tiny maggots get to work eating the dead flesh and it's juices. Then they find a dry place to pupate. They stay in the pupa for some 9 to 14 days before emerging to start the cycle all over again.
World wide in their range, these are a most valuable animal in that they will consume carcasses that even the vultures don't want (contrary to the yarns, vultures will refuse something that's really past it's prime). In this way, diseases such as cholera are kept in check, and the site doesn't stink for nearly as long as it might.
The carcass I am observing is a roadkill dog on the shoulder of the road in front of my house. The maggots are now working and I figure that in only a few more days it will be no more than a patch of skin and hair covering the well-cleaned bones. It started out as simply a dead dog, then bloated, and then the flies blew it. Now it is visibly collapsing.
Aside from birds and spiders, blue-bottles have one very serious enemy: ants. Indeed, any carnivrous ant. Even the little, nuisance house ants will attack and feed on the egg clusters, and here's an experiment that you might try that doesn't even take an industrial-strength stomach like mine to perform:
You are certainly familiar with the little slabs of absorbant paper/plastic that meat from the grocery story lays on, yes? Take a nice, blood-soaked piece of it and place it where the blue-bottles can find it. Watch it closely -- the egg clusters will come quickly and they won't be obvious. They will most likely be underneath the paper, if the fly can get under there. When you have a nice collection of smooth, white clusters, place the paper where the ants will find it -- most any ol' species of ant will do. The clusters will quickly disappear, carried back to the nest. This would make a good project for a school child.
As an aside, the way these flies hide their eggs is almost certainly where the 'spontainous generation' myths came from.
As a further aside, medical science is experimenting with them as a way of abraiding necrotic flesh from wounds, as they won't eat live flesh.
Now, y'all go and enjoy your suppers.... 
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Ricky
SFN Die Hard
USA
4907 Posts |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 06/27/2005 : 03:41:02 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Ricky
Great post Filthy, but just one question:
quote:
As a further aside, medical science is experimenting with them as a way of abraiding necrotic flesh from wounds, as they won't eat live flesh.
How do they tell live flesh from dead? I mean, of course they won't go up and eat flesh off a person who is swatting at them, but how about one who is just sitting still, not moving. Can they really tell the difference?
By taste. Flies in general are very sensitive to taste and their larvae are the same. Incidently, adult flies 'taste' through their feet, which is why they wander all over everything that they light on. To the maggot, live meat is yucky, dead meat is yummy, so to speak.
People who have had this treatment describe it as painless but with a tickling sensation along the edges of the wound. If I should ever get in that sort of shape, I'd ask for the fly larvae.
Odd, is it not, that the homopathic howlers say nothing about this excellent and remarkable treatment. A person'd think that it'd be right up their alley.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 06/27/2005 : 05:03:14 [Permalink]
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| As seen in the movie Gladiator... |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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