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https://theconversation.com/flies-are-masters-of-migration-its-about-time-they-got-some-credit-253254>
"As I sprinted across the flower-rich meadow on the eastern coast of Cyprus, I
could barely see my car. The air was full of tiny black dots, pelting like
bullets past me. I hauled open the car door and breathed a sigh of relief once
inside. I was surrounded by millions of flies, amid the most incredible
migration event I have ever seen.
The migration cameras my team and I use to monitor these insects counted nearly
6,000 flies per metre per minute. Being hit by a fly travelling over 25mph
(helped by the wind) hurts enough to make you want shelter quickly.
All of these flies had just travelled at least 60 miles (100km) across open sea
from the Middle East to Cyprus. This journey forms part of their springtime
migration towards northern Europe.
Butterflies and dragonflies are well-known insect migrants, but not because
they’re the most numerous. That title is given to the flies. I have studied all
of the insects migrating through Cyprus and the Pyrenees on the France-Spain
border. Flies make up nearly 90% of all migrants. Yet they have been
consistently overlooked by scientists and their ecological contribution has
been hugely underappreciated.
My colleagues and I set out to change this. We have spent months collecting
written sources that mentioned fly migration from anywhere in the world. Our
findings, now published in
Biological Reviews, could change our perception of
flies forever. Previously, nobody really knew the extent to which flies
migrated, yet they are the most numerous and most ecologically important of all
terrestrial migrants.
Fly migration has been part of written human history for millennia. In the book
of Exodus, when the pharoah of Egypt didn’t let Moses’s people go, God sent a
plague of flies to change his mind. Then God removed flies from the land until
“not a fly remained”. This last biblical quote is key."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
