Insects
Size: 5 to 10mm
Age: 10 to 40 days
Appearance: Grey-black
Sexual dimorphism: No
Food: Omnivorous
Distribution: Worldwide
Sleep-wake rhythm: Diurnal
Natural enemies: Frogs, spiders, birds
Sexual maturity: 3 to 5 days after hatching
Mating season: All year round
Social behaviour: Solitary
Threatened with extinction: No

• As an insect, the fly breathes through its tracheae (tube-like channels with respiratory openings).
• Flies are omnivorous and disdain absolutely nothing of organic material – even faeces is eaten.
• In criminology, flies are often used to determine the time of death, as they are the reliable first colonisers of the corpse. Depending on the larva’s stage of development, the time of death of a person can be determined pretty much exactly.
• Flies are enormously responsive. With compound eyes, they can reliably detect impending danger from all directions. In addition, the nervous system of flies works much faster than that of humans. For this reason, most fly swats miss.
• Although flies can transmit many diseases, they themselves are very clean animals. Their legs are rubbed together several times a minute to keep them clean, as they are the flies’ olfactory apparatus.
• Flies do not have teeth. Therefore, they have to soak the food with saliva beforehand.
• In the short life of a fly, it can lay hundreds of eggs. Since there are countless enemies (birds, spiders, frogs, lizards, bats, etc.), most flies are eaten before the first mating.