Fly

From Freepedia

This article is about the insect. For other meanings, see Fly (disambiguation)

As defined by entomologists, a fly (plural flies) is any species of insect of the order Diptera, some of which can land on food and transmit bacteria to humans. A few, like Ormia ochracea, have very advanced hearing organs. Flies are common amongst humans and have caused many diseases to spread in the past. The house-fly (Musca domestica) is particularly common amongst humans. Other flies, such as the horse-fly (Family Tabanidae), can inflict painful bites. The larva of a fly is commonly called a maggot. Image:Medfly.jpg

1 Maggots
- 1.1 Use in medicine
2 Fly-like insects
3 External links

Maggots

Image:White maggot.JPG Some types of maggots found on corpses can be of great use to forensic scientists. By their stage of development, these maggots can be used to give an indication of the time elapsed since death, as well as the place the organism died. The size of the house fly maggot is 9.5-19.1mm (3/8 to 3/4 inch). At the height of the summer season, a generation of flies (egg to adult) may be produced in 12-14 days.

Maggot identification uses a classification called "Instar" stages. An instar I is about 2-5 mm long; instar II 6-14 mm; instar III 15-20 mm. Respectively, these measure about 2-3 days, 3-4 days, and 4-6 days (for average houseflies or bottleflies) since the eggs were laid. By use of this data, plus other signs, the approximate time since death can be estimated by forensic scientists.

Various maggots cause damage in agricultural crop production, including root maggots in rapeseed and midge maggots in wheat. Some maggots are leaf miners.

Maggots are bred commercially, as a popular bait in angling, and a food for carnivourous pets such as reptiles or birds.

Use in medicine

Through the ages maggots have been used in medicine in order to clean out necrotic wounds. For more information, see Maggot therapy.

Fly-like insects

Image:Empis tesselata male (aka).jpg Image:A Fly by Matthias Zimmermann.jpg The word "fly" also refers to insects of various orders other than Diptera. Entomologists try to distinguish between true flies and other orders by hyphenating the names of true flies (house-fly, horse-fly, crane-fly), but giving the members of other orders unhyphenated names, either with two unconnected words (caddis fly, alder fly) or with a single, concatenated name (dragonfly, stonefly).