Everyone calm down. This is just viral advertising by Blizzard for Starcraft II. Zerg power!
(Here’s a related link for your viewing pleasure. Not as gross as the OP unfortunately: Infected Snails)
[QUOTE=psychonaut]
Your assumption is incorrect. Many flies are ovoviviparous, meaning that the mother retains the eggs inside her body until they hatch. The mother then gives birth to live maggots.
[/QUOTE]
I guess that explains it.
Thanks psychonaut. The only info I had been able to find online mentioned regular eggs as a stage of the fly’s life.
Thanks Terrifel. I used an Olympus e410, 14-42mm with a 10x macro adapter.
[QUOTE=Sattua]
Is there really a word in the English language that has three v’s in it? Cool.
[/QUOTE]
There’s more where that came from! Discounting inflected forms, we have overconservative, overvivid, vivisective, and my personal favourite, vulvovaginitis.
The tse-tse fly is also viviparous. Search “viviparous flies” in Google.
RedSwing: your fly is not an ordinary housefly… I mean it’s a different species.
[QUOTE=RedSwinglineOne]
The volume of maggots seemed rather large compared to the size of the fly. There were at least 20-30 of them in the first blob that came out, and I don’t know how many more were still inside. It seems surprising that the fly was still flying with all of those in there if they were eating their way around. Flies aren’t complicated creatures, but still…
[/QUOTE]
While it doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here, some parasites can leave their host functioning just fine even with large loads of them. If for whatever reason killing or weakening the host is bad for the parasite, then it will tend to evolve to be less harmful. I recall reading of the example of a salamander that tends to have as much as a third of it’s blood composed of a parasite; but the parasite doesn’t hurt or kill the salamander because it only infects other salamanders at the end of the salamander’s life when it breeds.
True, it is not in a parasite’s best interest to be too damaging. If those little maggots had however, been actually consuming their host as I thought they were, that little fly would not have lasted long.