FREE ESSAY ON HOUSE FLYS

HOUSE FLYS

Buzzzzzz! Buzzzzz! There they go buzzing away. Those pest that bother you all day. You
know whom I'm talking about, that's right flies. They buzz around you going into your
ears and nose. Landing on your food and everywhere else. Some flies are favorable to
humans, as parasites of bug pests or as scavengers and many others are important as plant
pollinators. Flies are also understood to be carriers of diseases like cholera, typhoid,
and dysentery.
In most breeds of flies their body has padded feet that are coated with hairs and the
tongue covered with sticky glue. Using a powerful microscope, bits of dust and dirt
holding on to the hairs show bacteria that cause a broad variety of diseases. Files get
these bacteria from hanging around garbage and sewage. Now, if those yucky flies touch
your food later, it my also become contaminated. Flies increase at a very quick rate. In
only five months a female fly could produce more than 190 quintillion descendents, if all
of her female offspring survived. The only way to keep the flies population down is to
prevent the female from breeding. Lengthy exposure to freezing cold weather kills flies.
In cold areas very few fertile females hibernating in protected places sustain the
winter. Warm weather arises them to seek damp spots such as garbage in which they lay
their eggs. The eggs are the size of a tiny grain of wheat, about 1/20 of an inch. The
female can lie up to 250 eggs in seven clusters. In about 24 hours the eggs turn into
larva or maggots. They eat and grow for about five days becoming pupae. After another
five days out comes a fully developed fly. In two or three days each new female is ready
to lay eggs. A fly's life cycle is only two weeks long.
The physical features of a fly are very interesting. An adult fly is about 0.64
centimeters long and about a half an inch wide (with wing span). A thousand adult flies
weigh less than an ounce. Every foot on the fly's three pairs of legs has claws and two
hairy pads called pulvilli. These pads conceal a sticky substance that enables the fly to
cling to almost any surface. So that is how they can walk upside down on the ceilings.
One fly has five eyes. Two of these are huge structures that cover majority of its head.
Between these are three tiny simple eyes, set in a triangle. Did you know a fly's vision
is not very sharp as us ordinary humans think it is? The fly actually relies more on its
sense of smell to find food. When you see a fly land on your burger, for an example, he
lands then fly away. That is because the mouthparts of a fly are adapted for sucking up
liquid food. It has a long " tongue" with two pads, or lobes, at the end, which act like
funnels for drawing liquid. The fly can also turn grainy food, like sugar, into a liquid
by up chucking its saliva on it.
The housefly has lots of relatives. The bloodsucking sand fly, stable fly, bees,
dragonfly, mosquitoes, tsetse fly, fruit fly, flesh flies, syrphus fly, drone fly, robber
fly, louse fly, nimble fly, humpbacked fly, March fly, and the false crane fly. Flies are
among the oldest insects. Their fossil remains are found in rocks of early geologic ages
and may also be persevered in ancient amber.
Bibliography
Compton;s Encyclopedia