So this morning I let a fly out of my car while driving to work. It landed on the inside of my window, I rolled the window down a crack, and the fly left/was sucked outside. I wondered, as I have many times before, whether I was condemning it to death by doing so.
The transition from relative calm to sudden, howling, swirling 65mph winds (or rather, from air moving at 65mph to air moving at around 0mph) must be pretty traumatic. Would its wings be torn off? Does a fly reflexively close its wings if the wind is too strong, thus allowing it to slow down to a safe cruising speed? Will it reach that cruising speed before hitting the ground? Or is all of this moot because it was immediately swept back into the side of the car and smashed?
Insects are better at surviving that type of thing than squishy vertebrates. I don’t know about the wind part, but for example, if one was flung against a car window, they’re pretty good at doing a quick 180 and landing on their feet.
It wouldn’t leave much longer than a few days anyway. Maybe up to a month total adult lifespan. Just long enough to meet an attractive member of the opposite sex and make lots of cute maggot babies.
I wonder a different thing: Do houseflies have a nest or home base where they live, anything like, say, bees do? (Whether they live solitary or in groups doesn’t matter, just to they have an established “home”?)
I’m wondering, if you relocate a fly far away from its home territory (for example, in a moving car) and then release it far away from its home, what happens?
I’ve noticed that flies seem to have a “territory” where they operate. In my earlier lives on the old planet, I used to do a lot of hiking out in the hills and woods. Commonly, especially on hot days, a fly would harass me by buzzing around my head. What I noticed very often is that such a fly (and other harassing insects) would follow me for a certain limited distance, and no farther. So this seems to support the notion that they have a home territory.
It varies according to the type of fly. This piece about Australian bush flies (which I find for some reason fascinating) contains this, from the brilliantly named Victorian Fly Suppression Unit:
They don’t fly to far from the nearest turd if they don’t have to. And as for the fly in the car, would you rather he had lived out his life in the car and been fried to death on the dashboard? Not that I care either way.
The other evening I watched one of the garden toads stalk and eat a daddy long-legs (it took awhile for the toad to wolf it down…all those legs, you know).
Could I have intervened to save the daddy long-legs? What would have been the environmental impact of doing so? What about the slugs I crush or fling into the brush?
I have no idea about the environmental impact. But consider that the favor you would have done for the daddy-long-legs is matched by the cruelty you would have shown to the toad. Zero-sum, it seems to me.
Now I know where to aim my time machine to change the billions of years that is the future that really is the past that never was or never will be when I perfect it.
That’s an interesting question, and reminds me of the unexpressed question I have always had which is does a fly come to harm if you bat it awy from you ?
They tend to keep buzzing around even after a good thwack - but it’s a thwack by my hand which is like a thousand times the mass of the fly.
Does the fly get internal inuries and concussion leading to a later death, or does it not give a shit ?
Okay, here’s an observation that might at least touch upon the OP’s original question:
You’ve probably seen or heard about, how birds will fly headlong into a window (not understanding the concept of “glass”) and break its neck or wing? I saw a fly do that once. I think it may have broken a wing.
It then flew away from the glass window, but its flight path was a very tight downward spiral. I didn’t see where it ended up, but I guess it landed on the ground and died. Watching it trying to fly but going in a dizzy tight spiral looked like a gruesome fate for a poor little housefly.
Probably the latter. All you are doing is accelerating them, and with their tiny mass they can take a lot of acceleration. It’s resistance to being moved by an impact - aka inertia - that hurts a critter in that situation, and with such a low mass they just don’t have a lot of inertia.
