Lord of the Flies, Revisited

Well I guess this has to be taken care of at long last.

Yeh, last year I wrote about the mysterious mini "lampshade flies" which congregate at the bottom of our hanging China balloon lamp in the bedroom during the warmer months.

A picture was painted of a benign, quirky little species which was just a slightly interesting little detail of summer.  Naturally I did wonder what species they really were, but took little action to clear up the question.  I do love puzzles in any case, and the air of mystery surrounding them was undoubtedly attractive.

Well, a couple days after that initial post appeared online, a very sharp student friend of mine, Rita by name, actually did clear up the mystery.  Good researcher that she is, she poked around here and there and came up with a number of sites describing the little guys.  Even their lampshade habit was touched on.

It is the Little House Fly or Lesser House Fly, (Fannia canicularis). Here and there are a couple typical sites treating them. After thanking my student, I learned that they were far from the harmless little guys I'd imagined.

My bubble had burst.  I had pictured innocuous, intriguing little guys doing their jerky dance around the bottom of the balloon lampshade.  OK, I figured they had to eat, and so on, but I only saw them around that one spot. Maybe they ate those pesky dust mites we always hear about, inhabiting our carpets, thought I.

Come to find out they light on excrement outside!  Shit, for goodness' sake!  That and rotting vegetable matter seem to be their preferred habitats. They feed and lay their eggs there.
Potentially carriers of disease germs, they seemed much less benign after I had read up on them.

Fortunately they don't explore houses further, following cooking smells to the kitchen.  No, they have that in their favor, the fact they just congregate in the centers of rooms, in our case under the lampshade. I do have yet to read any entomologist's explanation of just why they do that, and the question I posed in my first blog on the subject: what equivalent behavior do they do out in the field? I have read that it's mostly males you will find marking time under central hanging lamps. They also do get into miniature dogfights, buzzing around each other so lightning-fast you can't tell who is who.  So maybe these special areas are like "leks" to them, those avian meeting grounds where Prairie Chickens, Greater- or Lesser-, meet to strut their stuff in North America. In Europe, Black Grouse do it too, as I read. But that's rather fanciful, as there are always female birds around the leks coyly watching the goings-on, whereas here they do seem to be mostly males.  It was the birder in me, was all.

To wrap up here, I was going to rant on the fact of me being disappointed about their being not the benign, harmless creatures of my imagination. To shout to the heavens "Woe!  Woe, my image of an idyllic world has been shattered!", but what the heck?  I know what nature is, tooth and claw.  And shit.  And we usually think of flies in our anthropocentric way as being annoying, disgusting, disease-ridden little things.  I have learned a little bit about this species, and they never have been annoying after all. I'm sure too there are plenty of unanswered questions about their behavior.  So thank you, Rita for introducing me to the Little House Fly (more poetic than Lesser House Fly I think), a species I don't mind
living around me, even though I probably won't be inviting it to light on my finger.