SUPER FLY

All the latest buzz about the tiny, winged critters we love to hate—often unjustly.

“Let’s face it, flies do not win popularity contests.” So writes biologist and ethologist Balcombe, with considerable understatement. Every house has a fly swatter, and for good reason. “One in six humans alive today is infected by an insect-borne illness, and more often than not, the footprint left at the crime scene is that of a fly.” Proving the point, he opens with a stomach-turning scene. Traveling in Africa, he was infected by skin maggots that he was forced to expel with a combination of ointment and brute force, delighting a park ranger who hadn’t recorded their presences that far south in the continent. Geographically, flies are everywhere: Numbering some 160,000 species, they inhabit every continent, and some have even found a way to live in the ocean. As Balcombe writes, almost all of flydom is useful to humankind, performing essential services of pollination, waste disposal, and pest control and feeding countless other species. Diving deeper, he observes some flies do a nice job of controlling unpleasant creatures such as the fire ant. Balcombe provides an entertaining tour of the world of flies, from tiny midges and fruit flies to the large and obnoxious sandflies, all of which, he asserts, experience something like consciousness and have more going on mentally than we may believe. “Flies subjected to peripheral nerve injury by amputation of one of their legs developed long-lasting hypersensitivity to stimuli not perceived as painful by uninjured flies,” he writes, which may give one pause when an intrusive fly invites being smacked by a rolled-up paper. More definitively, he writes at the close of this appreciative natural history, flies help return us to our origins: “We are all bags of nutrients,” one entomologist told him, “and flies recycle those nutrients back to the earth.”

A lively, lucid exploration—everything you ever wanted to know about flies and then some.