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Where Do Flies Come From?
I was walking along a beach last week when I saw a freshly laid dog turd on the sand.
It was a cold spring morning, no more than three degrees with a fierce wind blowing off the sea. I looked for the offending dog, and it’s owner (if it had one) but couldn’t see a soul.
Then I noticed the flies.
There’s a scene in William Boyd’s 1982 novel, An Ice-Cream War, where on finding a body on a remote dry African plain, a soldier comments on the flies.
‘Where do they all come from?’ he yells.
As I stared at the flies buzzing around the turd, I was thinking the same thing.
There are over 125,000 species of fly of the order Diptera that include houseflies, mosquitos, horse-flies, blow-flies, hoverflies and crane flies.
Flies are everywhere. Where there’s organic matter, there’s a fly. Where there’s a human — dead or alive — there’s a fly.
When the soldier in the novel asks, ‘Where do all the flies come from?’
What his comrade should have said (if he’d been an entomologist that is) was:
‘They’re already here, old chap.’
Flies live in the grass, between the rocks, in the trees, in the soil, on the leaves. Eating, mating, and laying eggs.
