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Housefly
A female housefly
Conservation status
Secure
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Arthropoda Class: Insecta Order: Diptera Family: Muscidae Genus: Musca Species: M. domestica
Binomial name
Musca domestica Linnaeus, 1758

The housefly (also house fly or house-fly), Musca domestica, is the most common fly occurring in homes, the most familiar of all flies and indeed one of the most widely distributed animals; it is a pest that can carry and transmit serious diseases.

Anatomy of a housefly

The adults are 5-8 mm long. Their thorax is gray, with four dark longitudinal lines on the back, the underside of their abdomen is yellow, and their whole body is covered with hair. The females are slightly larger than the males and have a much larger space between their red compound eyes.

Like most Diptera (meaning "two-winged"), houseflies have only one pair of wings; the hind pair is reduced to small halteres that aid in flight stability. Characteristically, the media vein (M1+2 or fourth long vein of the wing) shows a sharp upward bend.

Species that appear similar to the housefly include:

• The lesser house fly, Fannia canicularis, is somewhat smaller, more slender, and the media vein is straight
• The stable fly, Stomoxys calcitrans, has piercing mouthparts and the media vein is only slightly curved

These houseflies are subjects of study by scientists all over the world.

Each female fly can lay over 9,000 eggs. The eggs are white and are about 1.2 mm in length. Within a day, the larvae (maggots) hatch from the eggs; they live and feed in (usually dead and decaying) organic material, such as garbage or faeces. They are pale whitish, 3-9 mm long, thinner at the mouth end, and have no legs. At the end of their third instar, the maggots crawl to a dry cool place and transform into pupae, colored reddish or brown and about 8 mm long. The adult flies then emerge from the pupae. (This whole cycle is known as complete metamorphosis.) The adults live from half a month to a month in the wild, or longer in benign laboratory conditions. After having emerged from the pupae, the flies cease to grow; small flies are not young flies but the result of insufficient food during the larval stage.

Some 36 hours after having emerged from the pupa, the female is receptive for mating. The male mounts her from behind to inject sperm. Normally the female mates only once, storing the sperm to use it repeatedly for several sets of eggs. Males are territorial: they will defend a certain territory against other males and will attempt to mount any females that enter that territory.

Housefly pupae killed by parasitic wasp larvae. Each pupa has one hole through which a single adult wasp emerged; feeding occurs during the wasp's larva stage.

The flies depend on warm temperatures; generally, the warmer the temperature the faster the flies will develop. In the winter, most of them survive in the larval or pupa stage in some protected warm location.

Some species of wasps can parasitise and kill the pupae.

Houseflies can take in only liquid foods. They spit out saliva on solid foods to pre-digest it, and then suck it back in. They also vomit partially digested matter and eat it again.

The flies can walk on vertical planes, and can even hang upside down from ceilings. This is accomplished with the surface tension of liquids secreted by glands near their feet.

Flies continually preen themselves, cleaning their eyes with their forelegs and dusting off their legs by rubbing them together. They do this because most of their taste and smell receptors are on the hairs of their legs.

Flies have a very highly-evolved evasion reaction which helps to ensure their survival. It is possible to confuse a fly's evasion system by swatting it with two objects simultaneously from different directions. The holes in a fly swatter minimise the air current which warns the fly of being hit, whilst reducing air resistance and increasing speed of the swat. This evasion reaction can also be used against the fly. Clapping your hands several inches above the fly will cause it to try to escape, usually into your just closing hands.

Houseflies release a pheromone called muscalure that serves both aggregation and sexual attraction purposes.

Illustration of a housefly

The housefly is an object of biological research, mainly because of one remarkable quality: the sex determination mechanism. Although a wide variety of sex determination mechanisms exists in nature (e.g. male and female heterogamy, haplodiploidy, environmental factors) the way sex is determined is usually fixed within one species. However, the housefly exhibits many different mechanisms for sex determination, such as male heterogamy (like most insects and mammals), female heterogamy (like birds) and maternal control over offspring sex. This makes the housefly one of the most suitable species to study the evolution of sex determination.

Even though the order of flies (Diptera) is much older, true houseflies evolved in the beginning of the Cenozoic era, some 65 million years ago. They are thought to have originated in the southern Palearctic region, particularly the Middle East. Because of their close, commensal relationship with man, they probably owe their worldwide dispersal to co-migration with humans. [1][2]

In colder climates, houseflies occur only with humans. They have a tendency to aggregate and are difficult to dispel. They are capable of carrying over 100 pathogens, such as typhoid, cholera, Salmonella, bacillary dysentery, tuberculosis, anthrax, ophthalmia, and parasitic worms. The flies in poorer and lower-hygiene areas usually carry more pathogens. Some strains have become immune to most common insecticides.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Musca domestica

Wikispecies has information related to:

Musca domestica

• Housefly from the University of Florida
• Many annotated images
• Article on the housefly, by Anthony DeBartolo, Chicago Tribune
• From The Straight Dope website:
  • How does a fly land upside down on the ceiling?
  • Why flies rub their hands together
  • If I hadn't killed 52 flies as a child, how many descendants would they have had by now?
• Dübendorfer A, Hediger M, Burghardt G, Bopp D. Musca domestica, a window on the evolution of sex-determining mechanisms in insects. Int J Dev Biol. 2002, 46(1):75-9.
• Brian M. Wiegmann, David K. Yeates, Jeffrey L. Thorne, Hirohisa Kishino Time Flies, a New Molecular Time-Scale for Brachyceran Fly Evolution Without a Clock. Systematic Biology. 2003, 52(6):745-756
• Pictorial presentation of life-cycle
• The House Fly and How to Suppress It, by L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp. U. S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 1408, 1928, from Project Gutenberg