After reading this, you probably won't touch that food that a fly has landed on again...
Most of the more than 110,000 known species of flies don't have teeth, so they can't chew solid food. Their mouthparts are like a spongy straw. Once they land on food, they need to release digestive juices to liquefy it into a pre-digested, gulped-down soup that they can swallow.
To get more food into their stomachs, some flies try to reduce the liquid in what they've already eaten. They regurgitate the food in vomit bubbles to dry it out a bit. Once some of the water has evaporated, they can ingest this more concentrated food.
And they do just that when they land on your macaroni and ragu or pork chop.
Disgust aside, what should worry you most when a fly lands on your food isn’t its vomit, but the microbes it could release when it comes into contact with its legs.
In fact, flies land on everything, excrement, corpses and garbage in general, thus becoming vehicles of even serious diseases.
But flies also have a reason to exist. For one thing, they are food for other animals. They are an important group of pollinators and many plants need flies to reproduce.
Some flies also have medical uses. For example, doctors use fruit fly maggots, the young and immature form of flies, to remove decaying tissue in wounds. The maggots release antiviral and antimicrobial juices, and these have helped scientists create new treatments for infections.
Finally, biomedical scientists around the world study fruit flies to find causes and cures for diseases and genetic disorders.
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