Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects

by Jonathan Balcombe

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History and a New York Times Editors Choice Pick

After reading Super Fly, you will never take a fly for granted again. Thank you, Jonathan Balcombe, for reminding us of the infinite marvels of everyday creatures.
--Sy Montgomery, Author of How to Be a Good Creature

From an expert in animal consciousness, a book that will turn the fly on the wall into the elephant in the room.

For most of us, the only thing we know about flies is that they're annoying, and our usual reaction is to try to kill them. In Super Fly, the myth-busting biologist Jonathan Balcombe shows the order Diptera in all of its diversity, illustrating the essential role that flies play in every ecosystem in the world as pollinators, waste-disposers, predators, and food source; and how flies continue to reshape our understanding of evolution. Along the way, he reintroduces us to familiar foes like the fruit fly and mosquito, and gives us the chance to meet their lesser-known cousins like the Petroleum Fly (the only animal in the world that breeds in crude oil) and the Chocolate Midge (the sole pollinator of the Cacao tree). No matter your outlook on our tiny buzzing neighbors, Super Fly will change the way you look at flies forever.

Jonathan Balcombe is the author of four books on animal sentience, including the New York Times bestselling What A Fish Knows, which was nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Science Writing. He has worked for years as a researcher and educator with the Humane society to show us the consciousness of other creatures, and here he takes us to the farthest reaches of the animal kingdom.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Nature, Biology, Animals, Audiobook, Natural History

340 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 2021

About the author

Jonathan Balcombe was born in England, raised in New Zealand and Canada, and has lived in the United States since 1987. He has three biology degrees, including a PhD in ethology (the study of animal behavior) from the University of Tennessee, where he studied communication in bats. He has published over 45 scientific papers on animal behavior and animal protection.

He is the author of four books. Jonathon is currently at work on a new book about the inner lives of fishes, and a novel titled After Meat.

Formerly Senior Research Scientist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, Jonathan is currently the Department Chair for Animal Studies with the Humane Society University.

Based near Washington, DC, in his spare time Jonathan enjoys biking, baking, birdwatching, piano, painting, and trying to understand his two cats.

Reviews

[George Ilsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flies are everywhere, and like most insects, many remain to be discovered and better understood.

Balcombe takes great pains to position flies in all their complexity. Many of us will think of annoying creatures such as mosquitos, or fruit flies in the house, and do not consider how important flies and other insects are for the food chain. Do you like birds and mammals? They could not exist without insects.

Bees get most of the credit for being pollinators, but arguably flies do most of the work in global terms. There are many plants whose flowers are adapted to one type of specialized fly, so they depend on each other for survival. There are even flies who look like bees, so what you see on a flower might not be what you think it is!

With chapters on sex, parasites, waste disposal, disease vectors, genetic research, forensic entomology, etc. this book is endlessly entertaining, if also at times completely gross. For example, we often associate flies with filth and garbage, because they will be attracted to a dead animal, yet the flies here, and their maggots, act as important recyclers and helping tidy up the landscape. In terms of agricultural, flies not only pollinate but they also control food pests.

Speaking of maggots — I didn't realize how important "medical maggots" still are in wound treatments. Of course, doctors try everything else first, all the more expensive, time-consuming, and ineffective treatments, before calling in the maggots (sterile, from special facilities) which selectively remove dead flesh from wounds and stimulate healing, hopefully in the process preventing an amputation or death.

Did you know there are thousands of kinds of fruit flies? Many many thousands of species. Fruit flies have been used for research for decades, including one experiment where they have been kept in complete darkness for many years to examine how they might evolve.

Sex-deprived fruit flies turn to alcohol, one learns. Flies remember adverse stimuli, and learn to avoid it.

Do flies feel pain? Are flies sentient? These are current topics in the ethical corners of entomology, and becoming increasingly important as insects are being raised as food.

Life would not exist on this silly little planet without an overwhelming number of flies and other tiny creatures, many of whom are going extinct every day (for example, the impressive rhinoceros-stomach botfly, which is vanishingly rare and threatened because its host animal is a rhinoceros).

Research has shown alarming and widespread drops in insect populations, and that is not sustainable — for all of us.

[Jillian Doherty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I was the reader for this, I've also enjoyed: The Mosquito : A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar (both phenomenal mirco-histories that are currently available).

It's an incredible narrative, illustrated a vast history of insect's aid to ecology, and waist-disposal, and much more - changing the way we see them, and their value. 

Readable, funny, fascinating, and a great gate-way read for those who love science but still haven't found a reading niche they can become immersed in!

Galley borrowed from the publisher.

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

We should all aim to have this incredible amount of reverence for all life.

[Rebekah · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To the anonymous quintillions”

1 Sentence Summary: A book about flies; in other words (the title says it best): the unexpected lives of the world's most successful insects.

My Thoughts: Flies are still not my favorite animals, but I did learn a lot of cool things about them!

This book was definitely well researched, and had a nice flow. It’s easy to understand even if you’re not an entomologist, and is surprisingly super interesting.

Some highlights:
- Forensic entomology
- Do flies have sentience?
- Maggot therapy
- Kleptoparasitism
- Fly adaptations and diversity

At the end of the book, the author discusses the global biodiversity crisis, which was great. Flies may be annoying, but they do play important roles in Earth’s ecosystems.

Recommend to: People interested in flies and insects (or nature in general).

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ewwww!! They're disgusting. This book covers all of the nasty things that we already knew or thought we knew about flies in excruciating detail, from their vomit, to their love of shit, to their disease carrying and parasitism, to their sex habits and more. Flies are everywhere and they are beyond repulsive. They are also, of course, fascinating.

This book had one of the qualities that I love best in a good popular science book. It overwhelmed me with information. I won't retain 1% of the information, maybe 10%-20% of the interesting information, but I learned a lot and, if I read more about flies, it will have given me a grounding for learning more.

My favorite new fly facts had to do with their wings. Flies unlike other flying insects except beetles have only two wings, with their second set of wings having evolved into a pair of flight stabilizers. They beat their wings faster than most other insects and to help them do this, they have evolved organic structures at the base of their wings that function as gears. They have three speeds. And while their wings normally beat in tandem, they have the ability to decouple the tandem lock to cause their two wings to beat independently for greater maneuverability.

[Neil Pierson · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you swat a fly, you are squishing a mechanism that is considerably more sophisticated than the computer on your desk.

This book is a frontal assault of weird and interesting facts about flies. A "fly" is a member of the order Diptera, meaning it has two (not four) wings. House flies, mosquitoes, midges, fruit flies, and no-see-ums are flies. Bees, wasps, and beetles are not. Dragon flies are not. (Spoofing alert here.)

Most of us have a negative prejudice toward flies, which is richly deserved. They buzz, whine, destroy crops, drink our blood, cause pain and itching, create wounds, penetrate the bodies of people and animals. They have caused immeasurable misery as vectors of disease. They tromp around on dead animals, then walk on our food.

It's no consolation, but they treat their fellow insects even worse. For example, a scuttle fly injects an egg into the body of a fire ant. The maggot hatches and makes its way to the ant's head, where it feeds for a while. Eventually, it secretes a substance that causes the ant's head to fall off.*

We realize vaguely that flies must serve some purpose, and indeed they are vital as part of the food chain, as garbage collectors and recyclers, as lab subjects, and even in criminal forensics. Bees get the good PR because they make honey while flies walk on dog piles, but flies are vital pollinators.

Besides reciting a ton of insect trivia, the author's main purpose is to upgrade flies in our eyes. (Figuratively, not literally.) He wants us to appreciate the marvelous diversity, functionality, and adaptation of these insects. The yuck factor is high, and the book includes some eco-scolding.


*Don't waste any sympathy on fire ants. They have sent me to the ER twice. They have filthy little mouths.

[Colleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great little book, with plenty of biology to entertain. The author is an ecologist, and shares the ecological lesson he hopes you get from the whole ,but only towards the end. The rest is full of weird and wonderful anecdotes

[Emmaline · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading the chapter on fly sex during our plane ride back from Maine made for some strategic finger placement on the page as flight attendants walked by.

I'll never see a fly or therefore anybody the same way again after reading this book.

[JournalsTLY]

Before reading this book, most of what I knew about flies were that houseflies spread diseases like typhoid and dysentery.

This is a treasure trove about flies, midges, ants, mosquitoes, wasps and more. These amazing creatures are lovers, heroes, vectors, predators and cunning innovators.

Any chapter in this book can be adapted to be a stunning and scary sc-fi movie - imagine maggots that can be used to destroy enemy as well as to heal by debriding an infected wound.

I like that now I know :

- Flies smell through their antennae and taste through their feet .

- And that in California, Alkali flies can make a bubble of air and sink into the depths of the Mono Lake so as to feed on the algae .

- the Goldenrod gall fly will use the sharp teeth it has as a larva to carve a tunnel, then go back to sleep in its cocoon deep in the branch; and then crawl out as a toothless adult, getting out through the tunnel it had preciously made.

- Kleptoparasitism is so common

- Forensic entomology can help catch murderers and exonerate the innocent.

This is a book that is totally worth reading ; after all the author allowed some larvae to carve tunnels under his own skin . His experience of myiasis is real.

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a great deal about flies (for one, I did not know that mosquitoes were actually flies) and it was all fascinating. I gained more positive feelings towards them almost despite myself although I think the author totally overdoes it when he rhapsodizes about the sensation of the fly walking with its little cilia and mouth parts etc. ON HIS ARM. I could have gone my whole life without knowing that while mosquitoes are feeding on you they are also peeing on you to make room for more blood. Nice. Plus of course many flies eat extremely gross things, and flies do gross things to other insects when they lay their eggs in them. But we need them and the other insects and we are wiping them out. If we don't die of climate change directly (i.e. via volcanoes tornadoes etc.) or of super COVID, the loss of insect numbers and diversity will surely carry us off.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

You may think twice about wielding your flyswatter after reading this sometimes excruciatingly detailed examination of the many varieties and fascinating, complicated dimensions of these ubiquitous insects typically taken for granted and regarded only as pests.

[Jillian Kohler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I was the reader for this, I've also enjoyed: The Mosquito : A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar (both phenomenal mirco-histories that are currently available).

It's an incredible narrative, illustrated a vast history of insect's aid to ecology, and waist-disposal, and much more - changing the way we see them, and their value.

Readable, funny, fascinating, and a great gate-way read for those who love science but still haven't found a reading niche they can become immersed in!

Galley borrowed from the publisher.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel like there’s a really entertaining, fascinating account of flies somewhere in this subject, but this book just doesn’t find it. I was excited to read this book because I thought this would be one of those popular non-fiction books rife with interesting details and intriguing facts. Instead, this book is rather dry, and its presentation of the life of flies feels more like a slog.

[Eric F · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's like a page-a-day calendar - each paragraph is a fresh factoid - it's not enough to propel a full reading - the author has read 1,000 fly books so you don't have to - interesting tidbits at every turn - but tedious reading.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is rare to find a good popular science book by an author who isn't a scientist specialized in the subject. Yet, although Balcombe is not a dipterist, this is an amazing book! The format—stacks and stacks of fly trivia—would usually bore me to death. There is no real narrative. At times, this can be tiring. But Balcombe pulls it off. The trivia is startling, and Balcombe explains it all very well.

> God in His wisdom made the fly And then forgot to tell us why. —OGDEN NASH

> When pollinators stray, they incur no penalty, but that’s not the case for the flower, which can’t make use of pollen from another species. In the evolutionary quest for pollinator fidelity, plants tend toward specialized features that favor insects uniquely built to service them. More specifically, because it is nectar that the pollinators are usually after, the plant drives insect-pollinator coevolution by incrementally offering routes to nectar that only one insect can navigate.

> At any one time, there are some ten quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects crawling, hopping, burrowing, boring, or flying. That’s 200 million for every living human, according to Animal Life Encyclopedia author Bernhard Grzimek. In his 2017 book Bugged, journalist David MacNeal presents an even more skewed scoresheet: 1.4 billion insects for every human. … think there are about 17 quadrillion (17,000,000,000,000,000) [flies]. British fly expert Erica McAlister estimates there are about 17 million flies for every human

> In the 1930s, British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane famously said that God had “an inordinate fondness for beetles,” owing to beetles’ fantastic diversity, which at that time far outranked that of flies. Today there are about one million known species of insects, of which 350,000 are beetles. But most flies are generally more elusive and obscure than most beetles, and as scientists have redoubled their efforts and honed their skills at collecting and identifying new species, flies have been catching up. There were about 80,000 known species when Harold Oldroyd’s classic book The Natural History of Flies was published in 1964. That number has since doubled to 160,000, and there are signs that we are still only scratching the surface

> We can flap our arms about three times in a second, while the smallest bird can reach a hundred beats a second. A housefly attains 345 beats per second; a mosquito up to 700 beats; and a tiny biting midge, a startling 1,046 beats.

> Funnel ants use bits of leaf, wood, or mud as sponges. Holding the sponge by her mouth, the ant dangles it into a desired source of nourishing liquid (e.g., fruit pulp or the body fluids of prey) before carrying the wetted sponge back to the nest. This technique enables an ant to transport ten times more fluid than she could otherwise carry

> A fly’s neuron quota might be a fraction of our own, but 100,000 or more is still a lot to work with. In fact, 100,000 neurons have vastly more potential connections with each other than there are grains of sand on Earth.
[This is not true]

> Fly larvae who have imbibed are less likely to be assailed by wasps. Alcohol consumption can even zap developing wasps in already infected fly larvae. And the diminutive flies appear to know it. “Infected fly larvae actively seek out ethanol-containing food, showing they use alcohol as an anti-wasp medicine,” … The only other insects currently known to self-medicate are honeybees and a handful of butterflies and moths. The phenomenon is more widespread in vertebrate animals, enough so for it to have been given its own name: zoopharmacognosy—from the Greek words zoon, “animal,” pharmakon, “drug,” and gnosis, “knowledge.”

> adult flies, when threatened by wasps, send warning messages to other flies with rapid wing movements. The fruit flies fear the wasps so much that when they spot one, they cut future losses by laying fewer eggs. Even flies who have never encountered a wasp before lay fewer eggs on hearing their comrades’ warning whines. Closely related Drosophila species produce slightly different warning sounds, but just as birds learn the alarm calls of other species they forage with, so do the flies learn to recognize the warning dialects of their neighbor species.

> Lovebugs (colloquially known as honeymoon flies) are midges well known in the southern United States, who have earned their name by holding the record for continuous copulation by a fly: 56 hours. (The standing record for continuous sex by an insect is held by a stick insect, whose marathon unions extend to 79 days … a male lovebug has transferred all of his sperm to his mate within about 12 hours. Why, then, does he remain attached for a day or more? The most likely explanation lies with a phenomenon called sperm precedence, wherein the last male to mate fertilizes most of the eggs. Prolonged copulation is an anti-cuckolding strategy

> Hawaii is a hotbed of fruit fly diversity. “There are about a thousand species endemic to Hawaii, a quarter of the family’s worldwide diversity,”

> Females with longer storage organs tend to remate sooner with other males, which further stokes competition among sperm and hence the advantage to males producing longer sperm

> Dark-fly is a Drosophila melanogaster line started at Kyoto University in 1954 and maintained in constant darkness for more than 60 years. With their generation span of about two weeks in ideal conditions, that amounts to about 1,500 generations, or the equivalent of 27,000 years of evolution for humans

> Researchers have credited mosquitoes with almost half the deaths in human history. That’s about 52 billion out of 108 billion of us

> In 1961 malaria cases in India had dipped to less than 150,000, down from 75 million in the early 1950s, with 800,000 dying in a single year. But DDT saturation campaigns—picture a nation doused with 60 million pounds of insecticide in one year—invited resistance. Malaria staged a comeback. India suffered a major epidemic in 1976, with roughly 25 million cases. … Anti-malarial medicines reveal a similar pattern. First used to combat the disease in Rome in the early 17th century, quinine was no longer effective by the late 1940s, and was replaced by chloroquine. By the 1960s, chloroquine was useless in most of Southeast Asia, South America, India, and Africa. Resistance to its successor, mefloquine, was confirmed only one year after its commercial release in 1975.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed SUPER FLY: THE UNEXPECTED LIVES OF THE WORLD'S MOST SUCCESSFUL INSECTS by Jonathan Balcombe.

Flies are the frequently loathed and misunderstood order of insects called Diptera, the classification for two winged insects, which includes not only house flies, but also mosquitoes, midges, fruit flies, gnats and so many more. Diptera may be one of the most species rich orders of animals on earth. Many have yet to be discovered, studied and named.

I was surprised to learn that Diptera, though two winged, actually have a pair of rear wings which over the course of their evolution were modified into club shaped structures called halteres which act as flight stabilizers.

Balcombe entertains with personal as well as scientific information about flies, and generally keeps the topics moving and light. He tackles diverse topics such as the expected anatomy and physiology, as well as the predators, parasites, blood suckers, and disease carriers. In addition, there are studies of insect minds and emotions.

What we often forget is the benefits flies provide through waste disposal and recycling, their contributions to science - especially in the field of genetics - their outsized role as pollinators, and their uses in forensics and medicine. (After reading about the use of maggots in difficult to treat wounds, I overcame my disgust to realize how much better they can be than the modern practitioners of medicine in some things.)

The book closes with a chapter about our reactions to insects, our need to consider them useful and necessary. Without them the web of life could collapse. We see this already when large numbers of insects - generally flies - are eradicated through pesticides, resulting in fewer animals that need insects for their food. Balcombe paraphrases John Muir "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world."

Also mentioned is something that I have discovered as well, when one studies an insect, one begins to see its beauty and intricacy. For me, this happens through photography and curiosity.

[James Biser · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an exciting nonfiction look at flies. The author discusses the number of species that are flies and the almost incalculable number of individual insects that are known as flies on the Earth. Looking at the planet from that point of view, makes a few billion hairless apes seem unimportant on a scale that is barely worth noting.

[Kristy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating!

[Jennifer Wadman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audio version was a delight on a long car ride.
Well researched with references to books that are now on the ‘want to read’ list.
Considered using this for high school biology however the amount of sex jokes was a little much.

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable book. I learned a lot. I'm into these books that deep dive on one species.

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has some of the foibles of a lot of pop science writing, but redeemed by Balcombe's unfailing commitment to the inherent value of living beings.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about something most people don't think about. The ever present fly. The author tried and almost succeeded in making me empathic towards one of the worlds most despised creature and that is no small feat.

If you love learning new things or love learning stuff on the margin of everyday life than you will enjoy this book as much as I did. I like learning new things about ever day things, and I love having my assumptions challenged and this book does this.

A fun read.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the year I read about nature. Seems about time since nature maybe plotting a well deserved demise of our species. Mr. Balcombe is an engaging writer who doesn't quite do for flies what Merlin Sheldrake did for fungi but comes close. He starts out recounting the time several fly larvae decided to park themselves on his chest. Later on he recounts the story of Rob Voss, a curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History who while visiting French Guiana become host of botfly larvae. When he got home he visited a doctor, a tropical specialist, who took a divot out of his skin which contained the larvae. There was another one but Mr. Voss refused to let the doctor hack away at him and collect the rare tropical specimen for his own collection. Eventually the larvae emerged and his wife kept it in a jar when five weeks later the adult emerged from the pupal case. While the doctor's removal resulted in a nasty scar, the natural exit by the larvae did not. This story supports the belief that it is we humans who are the rampaging bull in the china shop.

He discusses the notion that flies feel pain, that they could have a consciousness, that they do the dirty work relating to decomposition that we human shun. Within a few pages I was ready to concede his point so after awhile the earnestness with which he pled the case got a bit old. I would have appreciated more focus on how the fly integrates with other aspects of nature, to have felt the way their tiny place in our ecosystem worked with all the other tiny parts. Whether human beings 'like' or should like flies interested me little. There was a single paragraph on how there are five thousand species of fungus gnats which work to disseminate fungi spores. This helped me connect this book back to Mr. Sheldrake's book on fungus which is more about the interconnectedness of nature and less on the vagaries of human tastes.

of us would avoid; houseflies, fruit flies and mosquitos. The saddest fact I learned had nothing to do with flies but gives perspective on what we humans have done to life on Earth. 60 percent of mammals are livestock for us to eat then comes humans at 36 percent leaving dolphins, elephants, giraffes, rodents (really??) and monkey etc. to make up the remaining 4 percent. It's a hard record to defend fellow humans.

[William Farris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Review: Super Fly by Jonathan Balcombe. This was interesting read about the genus fly and its many species. While the topic might appear to be an unsavory and dry one, it is an easy and insightful review of the fly. The anatomy and abilities of the various forms of fly were interesting to learn. The functions of the fly were a surprise to me. While the diseases that the mosquito transmits were well known to me, I was surprised to learn that some of the flies are parts or the world’s great pollinators. The functions of the wasp were also a surprise. The later chapters were about forensic entomology and the role that various fly bites and maggot types and their development used to estimate the time of death of decaying corpses; I did not maintain an interest in this topic. The remainder of the book was an entertaining read. I highly recommend this book about insects so ubiquitous, and both disease carrying and useful to our environment.

[Dramatika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hate bugs! I still remember my first meeting all the crickets and other noisy insects one summer day at the country field, I was and still terrified by them and refused to walk there. My dad carried me all the way. As a city child I never met so many! My local park was very bare, all the grass neat and small, but here the whole field of smth moving flying crawling! I’m happy to kill a fly, mosquito or bee without much thought, even after reading this enlightening book! It was very interesting to find out about many types of flies. I still prefer them dead, thatnk you very much!

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

In spite of my narrow take on the title, Super Fly is about more than house flies, much, much more. The entire order Diptera is considered. The author’s scientific, mind-bending take on flies will leave you with a whole new attitude about midges, fruit flies, mosquitos, and, yes, houseflies. The jury is still out, for me, on black flies but maggots are now my friends and I respect them.

Warning: Certain parts should not be read while you are eating.

[Margery Osborne · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was interesting and well written, if a bit hyperbolic, popular science. could have done with a few more diagrams especially at beginning with anatomy but there is always wikipedia and google to augment lol. nice to have something that doesnt just focus on house flies and mosquitos and (now that i say that) a bit more on evolution, adaption and co-adaption beyond specialized pollinators would have been welcome. all-in-all worth the two days it took to read it

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. I was so excited to read this when I started it, but it quickly became too much for my brain after I got about 25% of the way through. I’m fairly certain that I will enjoy finishing it once we are not in a pandemic and I have space to wonder about things that aren’t going to potentially kill me. 😬

[Meryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew a book about flies would be one of my favorite books. Totally changed my perception of these incredible little survivalists. Well done writing evokes all of these emojies: 😯😧🤮🥴🤭🫣🤔😩😢🥰. Best consumed by listening to audio version, on a road trip, with a nerdy friend.

[Kate Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

YES, I JUST READ A BOOK ABOUT WHY FLIES ARE MISUNDERSTOOD.

The jury has made the verdict, flies are actually super cool!?? I feel like I'm such a nice person when I put my dogs poop into the compost now because the flies get to enjoy the snack. I'm a giver.

"To the anonymous quintillions" - killer dedication page, for real. And the first chapter, being called 'gods favourite' superbly funny to me. Flies are hugely successful, and you get taken on a fun journey to find out why.

I love a science writer who uses humour well, and this book really hit that.

I learnt so much from this book. The intro was so engaging and I was hooked straight away on getting to know the insane biology and inner workings of flies.

TAKEAWAYS:

- I HAD NO IDEA A MOSQUITO IS INDEED A FLY. It is a type of fly, still in shock tbh

- there's a fly that can make an air bubble to go underwater, what the fuck.

- I enjoyed the perspectives when we break away from anthropocentrism. Like how biting flies have kept humans out of ecologically sensitive areas, preventing habitat and biodiversity loss. (um, ok, are flies actually eco warriors!?) An example is the Okavengo Delta of Botswan,a home to the Tsetse fly, which can sicken humans and cattle.

- I enjoyed reading about how modern genetics has advanced so much to the studies of fruit flies (they reproduce hella quick, so evolution-wise they are cool af, there's like 100 thousand studies now). I remembered learning about it in high school bio, so it was fun to revisit and dive way deeper.

-I also enjoyed how flies are helpful for solving crimes. Like how long a body has been dead for. The speed and efficiency of how the flies colonise the deceased gives entomologists the ability to hone in death times to within a few hours, queue- murder convictions and exonerations!! that's cool yo.

- An artist, John Knuth makes art by giving flies the ability to paint. Hear it out! The flies eat a mixture of paint, water and colour and when they do a cute lil vom they 'paint' blots of liquid on a canvas. It's resourceful, what can u say?

- "as we venture further from humans on the evolutionary bush, our ability to apply empathy is weakened" He uses an example of its easy for us to see a dog chasing a ball and think they feel joy but we don't see flies mating and assign the same feeling. Interesting.

- "One reason we ought to be cautious in attributing consciousness and sentience where it may not reside is that seemingly intelligent behaviours may occur without conscious awareness. Evolution is a master problem solver"

- AN ACTUALLY FUNNY JOKE "What did one fly say to the other?" "Pardon me, is this stool taken" and that's how he starts off a chapter on waste disposers and recyclers. KING.

- "its ironic that we so often demean creatures as lowly for their affinity for dung and decomposition. Disgust is one thing, but disdain? how many of us have paused to reflect on the vital role flies play in helping to keep the world clean?" - like bro imagine if no bugs ate poop, it would be everywhere.

- Loved reading about maggot therapy for necrotising flesh and how new techniques in medicine are not always better (see antibiotic resistance etc) "in a world advancing so fast, we still come back to maggots to help solve problems, there's a lesson in that". "as we decay we might become fly food and sometimes that process ends up in the courtroom, or in another context, becoming fly food may help our health and extend our life". WOWIE, maybe I can extend some compassion to flies when you put it this way.

- In a paper, "Why is it (at least a small) wrong to harm a fly- philosopher Jeffrey Lockwood argues, "at the least our interactions with insects can be a means of practising the virtues of mercy, kindness, compassion, gentleness and love". Is there a super cockroach book? cause I may see flies differently but idk if I can for a roach ya know, still what a nice quote.

- "We may choose not to uphold these interests. After all, flies routinely disregard our own, as when they hound us, bite us, and unwittingly infect us with pathogens. However we choose to treat individual flies we would do well to regard them collectively as indispensable components of the world we share with them. Gandhi says "The only way to live is to let other lives".

-"We are born without the fear of nature" on insects, young children are fascinated by them, equally intrigued by a caterpillar or a dog. The fear we learn is from overprotective parents, peer pressure, misguided media etc, By the age of 10 most kids either love or hate them".

- We think that flies are the bottom of the food chain, but perspective shift here; mozzies are eating you, me and other big predators, so in a way, they are kind of at the top!?

- "Without carrion insects, we'd be dead. the earth would have used up its nutrients a long time ago. we are all bags of nutrients, flies recycle them back to the earth. This not only stops disease from lingering but it also provides plants with their food, life continues."

-"Whatever justified angst and antipathy we may feel for certain flies. We can simultaneously cultivate respect, been reverence for their essential place in the world. Failure to do so is not only a moral mistake it is an ecological error".