housefly

 

common name of the fly Musca domestica, found in most parts of the world. The housefly, a scavenger, does not bite living animals but is dangerous because it carries bacteria and protozoans that cause many serious diseases, e.g., typhoid fever, cholera, and dysentery. The housefly feeds by depositing a drop of digestive liquid on its food, which may be garbage, excrement, or other filth. Although most of the liquid drop is sucked back again through the insect's tubelike lower lip, or labium, a residue remains that may contain disease-causing organisms from previous meals. Disease is also transmitted on the fly's sticky foot pads and hairy body. Each female lays from 100 to 200 eggs in the garbage or manure on which the white larvae feed. With favorable temperatures, one generation or more per month may be produced. Metamorphosis is complete, i.e., development is in four stages. The housefly is classified in the phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Diptera, family Muscidae. For methods of control see bulletins of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.

Housefly
Conservation status
Secure
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Arthropoda Class: Insecta Order: Diptera Family: Muscidae Genus: Musca Species: M. domestica
Binomial name
Musca domestica Linnaeus, 1758

The housefly (also house fly or house-fly), Musca domestica, is the most common fly occurring in homes, the most familiar of all flies and indeed one of the most widely distributed animals; it is a pest that can carry and transmit serious diseases.

Physical description

The adults are 5-8 mm long. Their thorax is gray, with four dark longitudinal lines on the back. The underside of the abdomen is yellow. The whole body is covered with hair. They have red compound eyes. The females are slightly larger than the males and have a much larger space between the eyes.

Like most Diptera (meaning "two-winged"), houseflies have only one pair of wings; the hind pair is reduced to small halteres that aid in flight stability. Characteristically, the media vein (M1+2 or fourth long vein of the wing) shows a sharp upward bend.

Species that appear similar to the housefly include:

• The lesser house fly, Fannia canicularis, is somewhat smaller, more slender, and the media vein is straight
• The stable fly, Stomoxys calcitrans, has piercing mouthparts and the media vein is only slightly curved

These houseflies are subjects of study by scientists all over the world.

Life cycle

Each female fly can lay up to over 9,000 eggs. The eggs are white and are about 1.2 mm in length. Within a day, the larvae (maggots) hatch from the eggs; they live and feed in (usually dead and decaying) organic material, such as garbage or feces. They are pale whitish, 3-9 mm long, thinner at the mouth end, and have no legs. At the end of their third instar, the maggots crawl to a dry cool place and transform into pupae, colored reddish or brown and about 8 mm long. The adult flies then emerge from the pupae. (This whole cycle is known as complete metamorphosis.) The adults live from half a month to a month in the wild, or longer in benign laboratory conditions. After having emerged from the pupae, the flies cease to grow; small flies are not young flies but the result of insufficient food during the larval stage.

Some 36 hours after having emerged from the pupa, the female is receptive for mating. The male mounts her from behind to inject sperm. Normally the female mates only once, storing the sperm to use it repeatedly for several sets of eggs. Males are territorial: they will defend a certain territory against other males and will attempt to mount any females that enter that territory.

The flies depend on warm temperatures; generally, the warmer the temperature the faster the flies will develop. In the winter, most of them survive in the larval or pupa stage in some protected warm location.

Some species of wasps can parasitize and kill the pupae.

Houseflies can take in only liquid foods. They spit out saliva on solid foods to pre-digest it, and then suck it back in. They also vomit partially digested matter and eat it again.

The flies can walk on vertical planes, and can even hang upside down from ceilings. This is accomplished with the surface tension of liquids secreted by glands near their feet.

Flies continually preen themselves, cleaning their eyes with their forelegs and dusting off their legs by rubbing them together. They do this because most of their taste and smell receptors are on the hairs of their legs.

Flies have a very highly-evolved evasion reaction which helps to ensure their survival. It is possible to confuse a fly's evasion system by swatting it with two objects simultaneously from different directions. The holes in a fly swatter minimise the air current which warns the fly of being hit, whilst reducing air resistance and increasing speed of the swat. This evasion reaction can also be used against the fly. Clapping your hands several inches above the fly will cause it to try to escape, usually into your just closing hands. A successful method of removing flies from living spaces is to use a vacuum cleaner equipped with a long (1m/3 feet) straight tube at the end of a flexible hose. Airborne flies can be chased with the tube and will eventually be sucked into it. Standing flies can be approached slowly with the tube (1cm/half-an-inch per second) and often they will not fly away and will be sucked into it. Another method of killing a fly is to spray it with water (or, even more effectively, a more viscous fluid such as Windex), which will slow or prevent its movements, making it easy to kill.

The housefly is an object of biological research, mainly because of one remarkable quality: the sex determination mechanism. Although a wide variety of sex determination mechanisms exists in nature (e.g. male and female heterogamy, haplodiploidy, environmental factors) the way sex is determined is usually fixed within one species. However, the housefly exhibits many different mechanisms for sex determination, such as male heterogamy (like most insects and mammals), female heterogamy (like birds) and maternal control over offspring sex. This makes the housefly one of the most suitable species to study the evolution of sex determination.

Evolution

Even though the order of flies (Diptera) is much older, true houseflies evolved in the beginning of the Cenozoic era, some 65 million years ago. They are thought to have originated in the southern Palearctic region, particularly the Middle East. Because of their close, commensal relationship with man, they probably owe their worldwide dispersal to co-migration with humans. [1][2]

Flies & humans

In colder climates, houseflies occur only with humans. They have a tendency to aggregate and are difficult to dispel. They are capable of carrying over 100 pathogens, such as typhoid, cholera, Salmonella, bacillary dysentery, tuberculosis, anthrax, ophthalmia, and parasitic worms. The flies in poorer and lower-hygiene areas usually carry more pathogens. Some strains have become immune to most common insecticides.

Bold text==External links==

• Housefly from the University of Florida
• Many annotated images
• Article on the housefly, by Anthony DeBartolo, Chicago Tribune
• From The Straight Dope website:
  • How does a fly land upside down on the ceiling?
  • Why flies rub their hands together
  • If I hadn't killed 52 flies as a child, how many descendants would they have had by now?
• Dübendorfer A, Hediger M, Burghardt G, Bopp D. Musca domestica, a window on the evolution of sex-determining mechanisms in insects. Int J Dev Biol. 2002, 46(1):75-9.
• Brian M. Wiegmann, David K. Yeates, Jeffrey L. Thorne, Hirohisa Kishino Time Flies, a New Molecular Time-Scale for Brachyceran Fly Evolution Without a Clock. Systematic Biology. 2003, 52(6):745-756
• Pictorial presentation of life-cycle
• The House Fly and How to Suppress It, by L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp. U. S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 1408, 1928, from Project Gutenbergeml:Måscabat-smgcool

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