This is something that I’ve wondered since I was a kid. Though I’ve not known who to ask or whether I really want to know the answer.
What I would like to know is this: how do maggots, flies and other creatures find what they are after? For example, if you let a dead body decay in the sun, it will attract worms and maggots. How do the creatures arrive at the destination?
When I was a kid, I had a turtle. I fed him with fodder from a zip bag. If I’m not mistaken, the fodder was shrimp extract. One day, the bag hadn’t closed properly and there were small maggots in the inside of the bag, which rested on top of a drawer. How did the maggots know to travel from the outside, through my house and to the inside of that fodder bag? And why didn’t I ever catch any maggot on its travelling way?
Maggots are fly larvae. They get there because flies land on the body and lay eggs. How did you miss the flies? You’d be surprised. There are usually one or two in any given room of a home, especially in warm climates.
Historically, that’s an interesting question that gave rise to the theory of spontaneous generation. People in olden times, like you, failed to make the connection between flies (which were everywhere) and maggots. The theory eventually became that rotting flesh, or fruit, or whatever, just naturally turned into living maggots. Similarly, stored grain gave rise to mice, etc. Vermin are sneaky.
This is an oversimplification but basically maggots are everywhere. But they’re tiny and you don’t notice them. So they lay there eggs all over but most of them are tiny and don’t hatch or get eaten before they have a chance to transform into larva.
And IIRC this was disproved because someone ran an experiment in which he let a piece of meat sit under a thin porous cloth or something. Flies still buzzed around it and crawled over the cloth, but they couldn’t get at it to either eat themselves or lay eggs. The meat rotted and stank - but it didn’t get no maggots.
This is not true. Maggots are larval insects. Maggots don’t lay eggs, adult insects do. The adult insects find a source of food, lay eggs on the food, the eggs hatch into larva, the larva eat the food, the larva pupate, the pupae turn into adults, and the adults fly off in search of places to lay their eggs.
It is true that there are all sorts of microscopic organisms such as worms and mites that you don’t normally see without magnification, and these organisms are all over everything. But they don’t turn into macroscopic maggots.
Francesco Redi performed this experiment, which SHOULD have ended the theory of spontaneous generation for good. But it didn’t- the theory persisted another few centuries, and Louis Pasteur found himself battling scientists who thought microbes generated spontaneously.