From Deep Look.

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Like the beloved butterfly, a house fly goes through an incredible metamorphosis. To make its grand entry into the world, it deploys a specialized, fluid-filled balloon on its head called the ptilinum (till-EYE-num) to break open its pupal casing, freeing itself to buzz around your kitchen.

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DEEP LOOK is an ultra-HD (4K) short video series created by KQED San Francisco and presented by PBS Digital Studios. See the unseen at the very edge of our visible world. Explore big scientific mysteries by going incredibly small.

House flies start out their lives as eggs. Maggots hatch from those eggs and eat (and eat and eat) until they’re ready to pupate and turn into flies. Emerging from their pupal home takes a lot of effort. In fact, they evolved a whole organ just to break free from that hard case. They use that organ, called a ptilinum, a pulsing sac filled with hemolymph – or bug blood – just once in their lives, to get out of their pupae.

—+ Insecticide-resistant Mosquitoes?

Geoffrey Attardo, professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis (@UCDavis), who helped us with this episode (including filming some of it!), specializes in the biology of vector-borne diseases. He’s been investigating the physiological responses to insecticide exposure in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Aedes aegypti are carriers of diseases like Zika and dengue fever. Learn more about how these invasive insects survive the chemical onslaught of insecticides here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43676-9

—+ How can fly larvae help investigators solve crimes?

We were lucky enough to work on this episode with Martin Hall at the Natural History Museum in London (@NaturalHistoryMuseum), who shared his images of developing blowfly pupae for the video. Why did he and his colleagues make these images? Well, knowing what age a pupa is can help investigators determine when it may have been laid as an egg on a dead body. Read more about how they recorded the images we used: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.160699. And to learn about the forensic application, read here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00414-017-1598-2. Still hungry for more info? You can read more about Hall’s work on metamorphosis here: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.0071

—+ House flies flourish in filth!

Dana Nayduch, Research Leader at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Arthropod-Borne Animal Diseases Research Unit at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (@USDAARS), knows a lot about house flies! She was the one who tipped us off to their incredible metamorphosis and inspired this episode! House flies flourish in microbe-rich environments, making them powerful vectors for diseases that can harm animals and humans. Knowing which microbes they’re eating, how long they carry those organisms, and whether they eventually transmit harmful microbes is important in assessing the house fly’s risk to human and livestock health. Learn more in this paper: https://academic.oup.com/aesa/article/110/1/6/2893406

—+ More great Deep Look episodes:

Meet the Bug You Didn’t Know You Were Eating

This Weevil Has Puppet Vibes But Drills Like a Power Tool

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