Date:   2/4/2011 7:46:18 PM ( 13 y ago)
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http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2011/3125463.htm



Waiter, there's a climate sceptic in my soup!


Andrew Herrick, a Melbourne writer, keeps a keen eye on the march of the Melbourne fly, and climate change.

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Robyn Williams: So, do you believe it? That the floods are linked to climate change? You will if you're a feral Leftie, one of those who thinks just about everything has a climate connection: Nadal's exit; the return of the cleavage; petrol prices; the demise of Australian cricket; even the way the Premier of New South Wales, Kristina Keneally's hair goes on its gravity-defying bounce, all climate-related. Trust me.

But you can test all this experimentally. For the Australia Day weekend we go to the bloke who knows all about this, the Marxist-Leninist entomologist from inner Melbourne, Andrew Herrick.

Andrew Herrick: We just can't seem to reach a consensus, can we? When five thousand scientists say climate change is real, and that it's caused by human activity, others are wheeled out to refute this. Who do we believe?

Well what about deciding for ourselves by using our own backyard observations. If the smartest people in the world can't help us all to agree to share the same reality, then what about seeing what the world's dumbest creatures can tell us about its climate? And no, I'm not talking about right-wing newspaper columnists.

Back in the 1970s in Canberra, a summer job much favoured by we uni students, involved emptying drums of flies over the national capital from a low-flying CSIRO aircraft. The plan was to overload the fly population with nubile, but lightly irradiated, and thus barren, female flies. Upon these strumpets the males of the species would waste their ardour and DNA, thus causing a population crash. Well sadly, it didn't work out that way. An honest banner towed behind the plane would have read, 'Your Taxes At Play'. Just as the advent of the Pill in the '60s led to carnal abandon among humans, encouraging Canberra's flies to guilt-free love-ins apparently led to a moral decline in the fly population, a consequent upsurge in aerial orgies, and the inevitable outcomes -- fresh hordes of the buzzing buggers that summer. (Not to mention plenty of suddenly flush uni students behaving in much the same way).

It appears Earth's peak species, Homo Smartypants, has gone and outsmarted itself again. In the good old day, before we humans tampered with the weather, southern Australia's massed battalions of house-flies all headed off in Autumn, back to that hallowed rotting carcase in the sky, and then didn't come back to get up our noses until we were weighed down with Christmas parcels and Christmas debt. Well I don't know about you, but five years ago, the common housefly didn't arrive in our house before October, and wasn't at all common until the New Year. But then, in 2006, came a t8ipping point. Along came our first fly of the season, sun-bronzed and strapping for action, in September. And this has happened a month earlier in each of the last four years. Which is to say, this year (and mark it on your calendars, folks) is the first in living memory that our house has featured a housefly every month, even during the once buzz-free zone of mid-winter. Yes, for the very first time (at least since before the last ice-age) here in Melbourne there is no flyless season at all.

This anecdotal observation tallies with research into the increasing distribution of insects globally. In Australia in particular, a lot of attention is being paid to the southward spread of mosquitoes that carry diseases such as Dengue Fever and Ross River Virus. Any increase in the winter minimum temperature means your sub-tropical bug can lay its eggs and expect them to hatch earlier, and survive. As the frost line recedes, both vertically in altitude and southward in latitude, the range of Australia's insect species is expanding. Our Departments of Agriculture have maps showing grim red lines marking the extent of locusts swarms and infestations by other agricultural pests. And yes, in the last decade those red lines have bulged steadily southward, like the battlefront of an advancing army.

Back on the home front, locusts haven't reached Melbourne yet and for weeks now another pest has been buzzing around my household. There's that fly now, aimlessly performing loops and barrel-rolls around the kitchen, on the lookout for a free lunch. I thought I'd dispatched that fly to fly heaven more than once. But it may just be the one I let out the back door yesterday because it was too early in the morning for murder. And now it's come back for another go.

Trouble is, every time I open the back door there it is, or one just like it, ready and waiting to breach my defences. My last barrier used to be the fly-door, which I would take off and store in Autumn. But next year I may have to leave it on, for the first time, all through winter.

But wait, did I say that fly was buzzing around 'aimlessly'? What an arrogant species I am. Of course that fly has aims. It's locked-on, like a tiny carbon-dioxide-seeking missile, to my breath plume. I've tried not exhaling, but it clearly aims to zero-in and plunder electrolytes from my skin, or eyeballs. Then it can keep performing its feats of endurance and skill around my grimacing head. I suspect it may even be aware of my mortality, and is hoping I'll keel over any minute so it can use my corpse as a gourmet great for its horrible offspring. That's another thing I hate about flies: their optimism. And the fact that, in the long run, they're always right.

Well, I really resent such utter cheek. So what if houseflies were around 65 million years before houses were? It's galling that such a large, superbly-evolved creature like me should have my valuable time taken up by that primitive speck of protein - a literal pinhead with wings. Even getting up from my chair to do something about it squanders more mammal calories than a million flies uses in a million fly lifetimes, and may be entirely wasted anyway. But it rankles that something so dub should successfully get up my nose.

Success, of course, needn't require intelligence, merely persistence, opportunism, staying one flap ahead of the formation, dodging the flak and ducking for cover when the host starts to notice it's being parasitized. Just like bankers, really. Well, greed may officially be out of fashion this month, but try telling a fly (or a banker) that. They may be seen as a juice takeover target by that flying speculator, but I have weapons at my disposal. Not chemical weapons, not even the oxymoronic lethal-but-low-irritant kind that cram supermarket shelves these days. NO thanks. Back in the '60s, before my mother read Silent Spring, I must have absorbed a lifetime ration of DDT.

Our family was fumigated so often that I can still nostalgically recall the cheap aftershave aroma of Flytox. 'There's always one', Mum would sign, grimly pirouetting with the pump sprayer, whereupon the fly would abruptly peel of its holding pattern over our dog and headbutt windows, before crash-landing on the kitchen table. While the dog held its breath and scratched frantically at the back door, the fly would display symptoms of complete nervous-system collapse by spinning insane circles on its back, and finally buzz itself to death. William Howard Taft: a way to go. Like napalm and Mutually Assured Destruction, DDT was standard '60s issue overkill. What it did was turn on all the fly's neurons at once, while completely stripping its brain of any control, so every possible function of its body operated at beyond full capacity, all at the same time. For a human, it would be like competing on The Einstein Factor and So You Think You Can Dance and Race Around the World and Scrapheap challenge all at once. With the first prize being death.

But hey, who cares about a fly? Well OK, some Buddhists do. But if I can be mercenary here for a moment, the law of supply and demand surely applies. An Orange-Bellied Parrot is not only beautiful, it has rare genes, and so it's a relatively valuable species. On the other hand, the common fly is ugly (not to mention irritating) probably a clone, and way too common. I accept it may have a role to play in the ecosystem, by processing decaying matter, but why should its ecosystem extend to mine?

Back in that 1960s DDT haze, I was indoctrinated with that classic Louie the Fly and, dreamed up by Bryce Courtney, no less. 'Straight from rubbish tip to you;'[, went its jingle So that explained why flies were dangerous. Or were they" Just before a family feast in Tasmania, my Aunty Marge found that a leg of lamb hanging in the larder was flyblown. 'Don't worry', she told my mother, 'we'll just have rice instead of potatoes and no-one'll notice.' And no-one did. And no-one died, either.

This isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Eating maggots is not much different to eating witchetty grubs, which and after all, we should be accurate, are giant moth maggots. The witchetty grubs I've barbecued were amazingly tasty, exactly like scrambled egg fried with hazlenut oil.

I haven't a clue what fly maggots taste like, but if you're ever tempted to toss a few handfuls on the barbie, please drop me a line and let me know. I don't mean to suggest that our family liked flies, though. I once asked Mum why flies are so dirty, they're always washing themselves. She replied, shuddering, 'They're not washing, they're sharpening their horrible hairy cutlery'. That night I wondered about the concept of hair cutlery, and why women were so vehement on the subject of flies. It's the same today. My wife will enter the room hissing to no-one in particular, 'There's fly again!' as if it's always the same fly. And it may well be. But no-one in particular? That's me. I'm the fly guy around these parts: Official Insect Terminator. It must be a male thing, like putting out the garbage, but I'd better not start on that.

But Mum was right. Flies really are filthy little beasts. They have terrible table manners, quite apart from dying on them. You see, flies only consume liquids, and so they have to vomit on solid food to predigest it. Yuck. The suck the mess back in, and then regurgitate and re-swallow, a bit like a cow. Because they're so active and needs lots of food they also defecate rather a lot, also like a cow. And one peek at the coyly named 'fly speck' through a microscope is enough to make you realise it really should be called a fly-pat.

Even so, father than nuking a fly, like we did in the '60s, these days I prefer the original 'fast-knockdown' method - the same tried-and-true technique used by our forebears to keep the little buggers from spoiling a well-hung sirlion of mastodon. I spent a long time searching for the best swatter money could by ($1.49 at Crazy Bob's Discounts). But in the end I found it just didn't have the required heft. Then, by sheer luck, I found an ex-army model in tensile steel and bronze mesh, built sturdy enough for extreme tropical conditions, and clearly designed to combat the biggest fly the brass could imagine ever cornering our troops.

But though a fine example of Australia's technological savvy, that regulation swatter showed somewhat destructive tendencies when unleashed in the domestic environment.

Reluctantly, I was forced to de-commission it when my wife threatened divorce over the collateral damage. So now I use whatever's handy. After extensive experimentation, I find a moist and limber tea-towel to be quite effective, though I wouldn't want you think it's easy. If it were, there wouldn't be so many blase flies idly flapping around our kitchens, now would there?

Excellent reflexes are essential for efficient and dignified fly-combat. After all, flies are practically nothing but reflexes. IN 2008 it was discovered that a fly anticipates the approach of a threat, then calculates the angle of attack and alters its stance ready to make a swift getaway, all within 200 milliseconds, and while in flight it has a random movement generator that enables constant sudden turns at varying acute angles to keep you guessing. Knowing what I was up against, I embraced Kung-Fu, after hearing Bruce Lee used to snare flies I n mid-flight with chopsticks, before scaring them to death with an intense ultra-sonic squeal. I'll probably never attain that level of Zen rigor, but my concentration has improved no end, and I now avoid excessive emotion, because a fly, like all wild animals, can detect apoplexy rooms away. Believe me, that isn't a buzz, it's a high-frequency snigger. The best way I've found to outsmart a fly is not to swat it too fast. I recommend stretching the teatowel into a backswing position, and whipping it like you did at the pool when you were twelve, The key is to start slowly and finish fast, so the fly won't detect your weapon's forward shock-wave and escape in time.

That fly is standing on my ceiling right now, smirking down at me. It's small and fast and has eyes in the back of its head, and just about everywhere else on its head too. So sneaking up requires strategy. And even if I succeed in my mission, that fly will reincarnate again, I just know it, all through summer, and nowadays through winters too. A little more proof, if we needed it, or our warming world.

You see, it may have tiny brain, but that fly knows climate change is real. Which means it's a lot smarter than Andrew Bolt. But you already knew that, didn't you? So from now on, every time you're bothered by a fly, especially in winter, feel free to blame a climate sceptic. And swat away with vigour, won't you?

Robyn Williams: Note to Senator Bob Brown. If you do as Andrew suggests, at least you'll feel better.

Andrew Herrick is a writer now surviving (barely) in fly-blown Melbourne, where the locusts are heading as I speak.

Next week, after Australia Day fades, we go to New Zealand with Sue Taylor, to see how it really should be done.

I'm Robyn Williams.
 

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