Physical description
The adults are 5-8
mm long. Their
thorax is gray, with four dark longitudinal lines on the back. The underside of the abdomen is yellow. The whole body is covered with hair. They have red
compound eyes. The females are slightly larger than the males and have a much larger space between the eyes.
Like most
Diptera (meaning "two-winged"), houseflies have only one pair of
wings; the hind pair is reduced to small
halteres that aid in
flight stability. Characteristically, the media vein (M1+2 or fourth long vein of the wing) shows a sharp upward bend.
Species that appear similar to the housefly include:
The lesser house fly, ''Fannia canicularis'', is somewhat smaller, more slender, and the media vein is straight
The stable fly, ''Stomoxys calcitrans'', has piercing mouthparts and the media vein is only slightly curved
These houseflies are subjects of study by scientists all over the world.
Life cycle
Each female fly can lay up to over 9,000
eggs. The eggs are white and are about 1.2 mm in length. Within a day, the larvae (
maggots) hatch from the eggs; they live and feed in (usually dead and decaying) organic material, such as garbage or
feces. They are pale whitish, 3-9 mm long, thinner at the mouth end, and have no legs. At the end of their third
instar, the maggots crawl to a dry cool place and transform into
pupae, colored reddish or brown and about 8 mm long. The adult flies then emerge from the pupae. (This whole cycle is known as
complete metamorphosis.) The adults live from half a month to a month in the wild, or longer in benign laboratory conditions. After having emerged from the pupae, the flies cease to grow; small flies are not young flies but the result of insufficient food during the larval stage.
Some 36 hours after having emerged from the pupa, the female is receptive for mating. The male mounts her from behind to inject
sperm. Normally the female mates only once, storing the sperm to use it repeatedly for several sets of eggs. Males are territorial: they will defend a certain territory against other males and will attempt to mount any females that enter that territory.
The flies depend on warm temperatures; generally, the warmer the temperature the faster the flies will develop. In the winter, most of them survive in the larval or pupa stage in some protected warm location.
Some species of
wasps can
parasitize and kill the pupae.
Houseflies can take in only liquid foods. They spit out
saliva on solid foods to pre-digest it, and then suck it back in. They also vomit partially digested matter and eat it again.
The flies can walk on vertical planes, and can even hang upside down from ceilings. This is accomplished with the
surface tension of liquids secreted by
glands near their feet.
Flies continually preen themselves, cleaning their eyes with their forelegs and dusting off their legs by rubbing them together. They do this because most of their taste and smell receptors are on the hairs of their legs.
Flies have a very highly-evolved evasion reaction which helps to ensure their survival. It is possible to confuse a fly's evasion system by swatting it with two objects simultaneously from different directions. The holes in a
fly swatter minimise the air current which warns the fly of being hit, whilst reducing air resistance and increasing speed of the swat. This evasion reaction can also be used against the fly. Clapping your hands several inches above the fly will cause it to try to escape, usually into your just closing hands. A successful method of removing flies from living spaces is to use a vacuum cleaner equipped with a long (1m/3 feet) straight tube at the end of a flexible hose. Airborne flies can be chased with the tube and will eventually be sucked into it. Standing flies can be approached slowly with the tube (1cm/half-an-inch per second) and often they will not fly away and will be sucked into it. Another method of killing a fly is to spray it with water (or, even more effectively, a more viscous fluid such as
Windex), which will slow or prevent its movements, making it easy to kill.
The housefly is an object of biological research, mainly because of one remarkable quality: the
sex determination mechanism. Although a wide variety of sex determination mechanisms exists in nature (e.g. male and female
heterogamy,
haplodiploidy, environmental factors) the way sex is determined is usually fixed within one
species. However, the housefly exhibits many different mechanisms for sex determination, such as male heterogamy (like most
insects and
mammals), female heterogamy (like
birds) and maternal control over offspring sex. This makes the housefly one of the most suitable species to study the
evolution of sex determination.