Meat fly: how to fight and grow

If the title may confuse someone, then explain the following. The meat fly lays larvae, which are often used and in demand by people. Of course, this primarily applies to anglers who rarely go to water bodies without maggots.

The second use of the meat fly larvae was found in military medicine. In conditions of lack of medicines, rotting wounds were treated with maggots. Here, the property of the larvae to eat the dying tissue and not to touch the living was used. Several maggots were planted in a decaying wound, and after a while they made it clean.

Biology

Outwardly, meat flies, especially gray ones, are similar to ordinary house flies, but significantly exceed their size. The length of their body can reach up to 25 millimeters in some species. The body of all species of the family is covered with short fibers, so the insect looks a little shaggy.
The meat flies have huge eyes on the background of the facet type body, most often they have a reddish tint of various saturation.

Our help! Faceted eyes are a bit like a grid consisting of many separate particles - ommatidia, each of which “sees” its own part of space and transmits a signal to the brain.

Reproduction and lifestyle

Adult flies live only 5-7 days from the moment of exit from the pupa. During this time, they manage to mate and lay about twenty thousand (!) Larvae.

Our help! Since gray meat flies are viviparous, the egg stage in their development is absent.

The female lays offspring on decaying flesh. It can be meat, fish or other organic residues. The appeared larvae are very active and literally in the first seconds of life begin to eat intensely. At the end of the weekly period, these are maggots that are fully formed, by the standards of anglers.

After 10-14 days, depending on the sufficiency of the feed and the ambient temperature, the larvae pupate, the dams turn into caster. Pupae also attract fishermen, like fish, as hook bait, but they are used much less frequently.

A pupa imago appears on the third to fourth day of development.

Food

Both adult insects and their larvae feed on decaying remains, such as:

• meat;
• a fish;
• fruits;
• milk;
• eggs
• caterpillars
• insects
• feces.

The meat fly is a natural orderly, therefore its influence on the surrounding nature is great, but this does not mean that they need to be endured near your home.

Types of meat flies

The most common are three types of meat flies:

• gray
• green
• blue

We will talk about them in more detail.

Gray

The gray meat fly is, as noted above, a viviparous insect. It reaches one and a half centimeters in length and is distinguished by a gray striped body color.

Attention! Thanks to the macro capabilities, we can see the insect in the smallest detail.

Green fly

The green meat fly has a body length of ten millimeters, which is painted in brilliant green. The most heat-loving kind of meat. In the middle zone of our country, a rare species, often lives much south.

Blue

The largest of the common meat flies is blue. The length of her body is usually more than one and a half centimeters.They hum very loudly when flying, almost like bees. It is these flies that have the largest, Michurin maggots that are so appreciated by anglers. Naturally, the body color of these flies corresponds to their name.

Harm

Now let's talk about what harm a meat fly can do to a person. Besides the fact that they are unpleasant when they appear near the home, they are still able to tolerate diseases dangerous to humans. The worst of them is leprosy, or leprosy. But this, of course, is very rare in our time, but even an upset gastrointestinal tract will not give us pleasant feelings.

In addition, larvae of meat flies can postpone on fresh, and even salted, products. So the meat fly harms all the same fishermen who hang out not completely salted fish for drying.

Annoy flies and our pets. They carry their diseases, eating corpses of fallen animals.

Fight

The fight against meat flies is simple and, subject to basic hygiene rules, may not be necessary at all. Just follow the basic rules:

1. Do not plant a dump near your home, throwing meat and fish waste there.
2. During the death or slaughter of animals or birds, it is imperative to bury their remains under a layer of soil, not to allow them to decompose in the open air.
3. In summer, install nets on the vents to prevent meat flies and other insects from entering the premises. This is especially true for people living on the lower floors of apartment buildings, or in low-rise buildings.
4. Hanging sticky traps can also significantly reduce the number of meat flies.
5. A room heavily infected with flies can be treated with some kind of insecticidal agent, for example, the popular Dichlorvos.

Advice! When using a strongly smelling product in a living room, do not forget, then, to ventilate it in order to avoid your own poisoning.

Breeding

For the same person who is not against breeding meat flies, and in particular their maggot maggots, this section of our story is intended. We will tell you how to make the simplest maggot from our favorite material for all kinds of crafts - an irreplaceable plastic bottle.

This is done as follows:

1. Cut the plastic bottle into two so that the upper part with the neck, being turned upside down and inserted in the lower half, does not reach the bottom by 4-5 centimeters.
2. Pour the sawdust with a layer of two to three centimeters into the lower part of the “one and a half” or “two-piece”.
3. In the upper part lay a piece of fresh meat or a piece of fish that has started to deteriorate. You can, by the way, lay a few small fish rejected by you after fishing.
4. Place the maggot in a shaded area.

When the meat begins to deteriorate, the flies learn it and lay their testicles there. Hatched larvae will feed on the substrate proposed by them. Soon, a week after hatching their eggs, they will stop eating, preparing for pupation, and will leak through the neck of the bottle straight to the sawdust.

Thanks to crawling in sawdust, maggots will clear of the smell of falling, and you can feel free to take them with you for fishing. If you put an egg in the moth, the larvae will be the largest.