Saturday, December 22, 2007

THE FLY AND THE DRAGONFLY

Obviously the fly is saying to himself, "Will I ever grow up and be like him." Flies, of course, are quite stupid. One investigator tried 26 years to train a common housefly. He got nowhere. In fact, one of his experiments involved micro-surgery, cutting the gut ring around the fly's neck. The fly ate until he exploded. Like I say, flies are really stupid.

Flies are difficult to photograph. I was lucky getting two "flies" to pose so nicely for me.

Since the common house fly is so automatic (hard wired as we put it) in his behavior, catching a fly by hand is easily learned. A fly always takes off backwards, so one can slowly inch their hand toward the rear end of the fly, about 6 inches off the ground or table (or wherever the fly has landed) and close the hand when the fly takes off.

Flies make great motors for toy airplanes. The airplane has to be extremely small, made out of slivers of balsa wood and cellophane, and the fly is glued to the front of the device. Of course, one has to catch the fly first, and immobilize if in the refrigerator. Make sure the fly is in a secure container. Once my mother opened the refrigerator before the critters had been immobilized, and when they flew out, she thought the fridge was in need of a total scrubbing. My older brother, Byron, and I made many such airplanes--blow flies make the best motors, because they are big.
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