CREATIVE NONFICTION 49
needle making a startlingly large hole in
the thorax. How many days until the pupae
hatched? How long until the adult flies were
sexually mature? What did they need to eat?
“Read up,” he told me. “I want you to be able
to answer any question I throw at you.”
But literature on the life cycle and behavior
of houseflies was surprisingly scarce, and the
research I managed to dig up was usually dated
from the seventies. Most of the present-day
articles were highly specialized, focusing on
aspects of genetics and biochemistry, with titles
like “Mass spectrometric analysis of putative
capa-gene products in Musca domestica and
Neobellieria bullata.”
I asked Verena about the knowledge gap.
“It’s not popular to study insect behavior
anymore,” she said with a measure of regret.
“It’s seen as kindergartner stuff—not ‘scientific’
enough.”
In other words, anybody could watch bugs.
That was how I got into entomology in the
first place. A fanatic about animals from my
earliest years, I collected and studied insects and
arachnids as a kid when more traditional pets
were lacking. Some of my earliest memories are
of talking to two large spiders that lived in a
bottom bookshelf—and weeping when one fell
victim to the vacuum cleaner. In elementary
school, I caught crickets and kept them in an
empty coffee can outfitted with crumpled paper
towels, sticks, and tiny trapezes made out of
paper clips. I wrote a three-page instruction
manual for other would-be cricketeers, which
included a note that if you forgot to feed them,
they would eat each other.
In college, I could be found getting a leg up to
net a praying mantis at my dorm light or stuff-
ing the freezer with bags and jars of specimens
to my roommates’ chagrin. I felt flattered when
a friend told me, “I saw a weird bug the other
day and thought of you.”
the paucity of publications on normal
housefly behavior meant that I had to spend a
lot of time observing the habits of healthy flies
and then verifying what I saw in old articles.
Sometimes, the results astonished me.
Take the sex.
Previous research had prepared me for some
of what transpired when I combined healthy
virgin male and female flies in a mating cage
(the cage is less exciting than it sounds, consist-
ing of a plastic container with a cotton sleeve
over the mouth). As soon as the flies awoke from
their cold-induced slumber, the males started
“striking” the females. The strike is like a gentle
pounce. The smaller male lands on a resting
female’s back and crouches near her head. Using
his forelegs, he strokes her head several times;
then he shuffles back and curls his abdomen
under hers. All this had been well documented,
but when I strained to see the finer details of
copulation, what I saw caught me off guard. I
waited until I had observed the phenomenon
in more than one couple before I called Verena
over to take a look.
“Is it just me,” I said, “or is the female pen-
etrating the male?”
She adjusted her glasses and peered into the
mating arena. “Hmm. That is interesting.”
In insects, the male sex organ is known as the
aedeagus, and in houseflies, this is visible at the
end of the abdomen as a dark round stump. The
genitalia of the female housefly, in contrast,
is a needle-like ovipositor, which is normally
withdrawn into the abdomen but can extend
like a telescope during intercourse and when
laying eggs. A female generally mates only once
during her lifetime; after insemination, she
stores the sperm in organs called spermathecae,
allowing her to fertilize her own eggs, laying
them in daily batches for about a week.
What we had presumed about housefly
copulation was that the male inserted his
aedeagus into the female sex organ and depos-
ited his sperm. However, as we watched, we
realized that it was the female who responded
to the male’s courtship ritual by extending her
ovipositor into his genitalia. Essentially, she
controlled the mating; she collected the sperm
for herself. This explained all the preliminary
fussing and foreplay. It’s impossible for a male
fly to force himself onto or into a female. All
he can do is feel her up, shimmy back to her
abdomen, and wait.
Even more surprising than the mechanics of
housefly sex, though, was the virtual absence