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Tuesday Tunes – I Am the Fly – Wire

Fun Stuff, Insects, Pop Culture, Tuesday Tunes 3 Responses »

Nov 292011

It’s been awhile since Tuesday Tunes featured a song about those beautiful bi-winged bugs the flies, so I think we’ll rectify that!

This isn’t the first time that Wire has been featured here on Biodiversity in Focus, with their song Outdoor Miner previously making the list. That song featured a relatively accurate depiction of a leaf miner fly, probably in the family Agromyzidae. Today’s song features flies a little closer to home, repeatedly talking about a fly in the ointment and flies causing more disease than fleas.Well, that and a divergent wasp dealing with plate-glass (side note: Flickr is fun).

So what might the flies be? Well I’m going to go with the common house fly (Musca domestica) for the fly in the ointment, just based on ubiquity and the odds of one ending up in someone’s moisturizer/tonic/soup. How about the flies causing more disease than fleas? Well, fleas are vectors for a number of diseases, with the big one being the Bubonic Plague. With an estimated 75 million people killed during the Black Death pandemic and another 12-15 million more killed in epi- and pandemics up until the mid 20th century, I think we can confidently put a back-of-the-napkin (BOTN) estimate of 100 million deaths attributable to fleas in recorded history. Tsetse flies (Glossinidae, 23 species total, 2 of which are of medical importance to humans) are vectors for the trypanosome that causes African Sleeping Sickness, which was listed as killing 48,000 people in 2008. A BOTN gives me an estimate of 100 million deaths in the last 2000 (50k x 2000 years, assuming smaller populations but higher mortality rates), so Tsetse flies are a possibility. Our next suspect might be the common house fly from earlier. Known to spread diseases such as typhoid (BOTN = 20 million deaths out of 450 million in past 2000 yrs), cholera (BOTN = 30 million deaths out of ~600 million in past 2000 yrs), and dysentery (BOTN = 50 million deaths out of 1.5 billion in past 200 yrs) among others, the house fly may be a dark horse in this race.

Of course, the best bet are the mosquitoes. With the genus Anopheles (the vector for Malaria) responsible for easily 100 million deaths in the past 200 years, not to mention the deaths attributable to Yellow Fever & Dengue Fever (Aedes aegypti) and “minor” diseases like West Nile Virus and Japanese Encephalitis (Culex). I think it’s pretty safe to say that mosquitoes are the most deadly insect known to man!

Anyways, that was a pretty morbid tangent from the song, so let’s just listen to some music shall we?

(All estimates based on conservative values found in Wikipedia. Some estimates may be horribly off, so best to do a more thorough literature check if you need more reliable numbers!)

This song is available on iTunes – I Am the Fly – Chairs Missing (Remastered)

Porn in the Morn – updated

Biology, Cool Science, Entomology 8 Responses »

Aug 272010

One of the talks that drew the largest crowds at the 7th International Congress of Dipterology a few weeks ago was on the functional morphology and sexual selection in mating tsetse flies, Glossina pallidipes & Glossina swynnertonni (Glossinidae)*. Why was a talk on fly porn so popular you may ask? Well Dipterists in general are always on the lookout for mating opportunities (of their research subjects – get your mind out of the gutter) and with the promise of videos and a new technique, it was like a moth to a flame (so to speak). The videos were amazing, and as of last night were made available via YouTube for the world to see! (Explanation after the videos)

Full speed video of G. pallidipes:

Slow Motion video of G. pallidipes:

Slow motion video of G. swynnertonni:

So what’s going on here? These are x-ray videos of copulation made by the research team using a synchrotron facility in Europe. The female (the abdomen on the right) has been glued to a stage and the tip of her abdomen placed in the path of the beam of x-rays. Barry White is piped into the chamber, candles are lit, the lights are turned down low, and the male is released into the chamber to do his thing (his abdomen is on the left). When coupling begins the x-ray beam is turned on and we get a very intimate idea of mating in tsetse flies! What we see happening is the phallus of the fly is the part that is thrust in and out within the vagina of the female (easiest to see on the first slo-mo video), and is apparently stimulating the female with ornate, inflatable projections. Possibly he is attempting to make her receptive to his sperm. Meanwhile on the outside, the hook pressing the outside of the female’s abdomen is also involved in stimulation. In this case, experiments have shown that these stimuli induce the female to receive and transport sperm, to ovulate, and to reject future mating attempts by other males. These routines are hypothesized to be an evolutionary race between the males to be especially effective stimulators, with the female requiring just the right touch to accept the males sperm and use it to fertilize her eggs. Ejaculation occurs only after many minutes of rhythmic thrusting and squeezing (in G. pallidipes, in the last minute or two of an approximately 45 minute copulation).

To the best of my knowledge this is the first time that anyone has seen what’s happening inside, in real-time, during copulation in flies. A really amazing insight into the mojo of flies, and hopefully a technique that can be used more in the future to untangle the complicated world of fly genitalia!

Thanks to the research team for making this video available:

R. Daniel Briceño, William Eberhard, Ernesto Chinea-Cano, Dariusz Wegrzynek, and Tommy dos Santos Rolo

ICD7 Talk:

Species-specific behavioral differences in male tsetse fly genitalia revealed by x-ray videos – R.D. Briceño, W.G. Eberhard, E. Chinea-Cano, D. Wegrzynek, T. dos Santos Rolo. Presented to the ICD7 Aug. 11 2010, San Jose, Costa Rica.

* – Tsetse flies are the group of flies responsible for commuting the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness in Africa, making them one of the most important human disease vectors on Earth.

UPDATED Aug-10-2010 4:00PM : In order to make sure the details of the research were correct I contacted Dr. Briceño, who kindly provided the information highlighted in BOLD. I’ve removed erroneous information from my initial post.

UPDATED MAR-9-2011: Here’s the reference to the published paper:
Briceño, R. D., D. Wegrzynek, E. Chinea-Cano, W. G. Eberhard and T. dos Santos Rolo “Movements and morphology under sexual selection: tsetse fly genitalia.” Ethology Ecology & Evolution 22(4): 385 – 391.

* – Tsetse flies are the group of flies responsible for commuting the trypanosomes that cause sleeping sickness in Africa, making them one of the most important human disease vectors on Earth.

UPDATED Aug-10-2010 4:00PM : In order to make sure the details of the research were correct I contacted Dr. Briceño, who kindly provided the information highlighted in BOLD. I’ve removed erroneous information from my initial post.

UPDATED MAR-9-2011: Here’s the reference to the published paper: Briceño, R. D., D. Wegrzynek, E. Chinea-Cano, W. G. Eberhard and T. dos Santos Rolo “Movements and morphology under sexual selection: tsetse fly genitalia.” Ethology Ecology & Evolution 22(4): 385 – 391.

UPDATED MAR-9-2011: Here’s the reference to the published paper:
Briceño, R. D., D. Wegrzynek, E. Chinea-Cano, W. G. Eberhard and T. dos Santos Rolo “Movements and morphology under sexual selection: tsetse fly genitalia.” Ethology Ecology & Evolution 22(4): 385 – 391.