House Flies: Learning 2

Since my earlier post was what I learned yesterday, I thought I'd post again with what I learned today. The past couple days we have noticed a housefly buzzzing around our home (I was going to correct that extra z, but then decided I liked it). It's only one, so at first it wasn't super annoying, it just buzzed angrily around the windows while I sat on the couch. But recently, it has become more fond of us and keeps landing on us and following us around the house. This morning Phyl left for work at 6:30 and I went back to sleep (yay summer and going back to sleep!) but it was made more challenging by the fact that the fly suddenly appeared and kept buzzing around my head. I'd sleepily swat at it, it would leave for a minute, come back, repeat. I covered my head with the sheet but even then I could hear the buzzing. Mr. Fly is still buzzing around (he was waiting for me on the bathroom mirror, and then he kept landing on our legs this afternoon) so I decided to research house flies to learn more about him. Here are some things I learned:

1. House flies can carry diseases. Like leprosy. I hope Mr. Fly doesn't turn me into a leper.

2. House flies have tiny hairs called tarsi on the end of their legs that work like taste buds. So when Mr. Fly keeps landing on us, what he is really doing is tasting us. This is slightly disconcerting.

3. House flies can only ingest liquid food because they can't chew. If they want to eat solid food like a grain of sugar, they regurgitate saliva and digestive juices to dissolve their potential meal. Apparently this is the real reason you don't want flies to land on your food while you're eating, because if they decide they also like your meal, you may end up with regurgitated fly juice on your food. Ew.

4. House flies can live up to 3 months, but their average life span is 3 weeks. So Mr. Fly will be leaving us by September at the latest. Hopefully we will swat him long before then.

5. House flies are not entirely useless creatures. They break down decomposing materials in the ecosystem and provide protein to birds and lizards that eat them. Some scientists also think larvae can be used to make cancer medicine, and apparently there are housefly farms in China for this purpose.

6. Some ancient civilizations had fly gods that they made sacrifices to in order to keep houseflies out of their homes and temples.