There Ain't No Flies On Us

Or are there.

When my family moved to Canberra (the bush capital) flies (in this case  Musca vetustissima) were a serious problem. You had to have one hand in front of you face, continually waving. It was known as the Aussie salute.

The problem was cattle, or more accurately, cow pats. Canberra was surrounded by cattle farms - I reckon that nowhere in Canberra were you ever more than 5 miles from a herd of cattle. Australian dung beetles had evolved to deal with Australian dung: mainly marsupial, little hard pellets, not big sloppy wet cow pats. The cow poo was starting to build up, because each beast does 10-12 pats a day, and they were sitting on the ground for up to a year before they were too hard for flies to have any interest in them.

This means there was plenty of places for flies to lay their eggs, and the resulting swarm was starting to cause serious ecological damage.

But all this part is Susan's balliwick. We'll probably talk about the dung beetle program later.

All I was going to say it that there ain't no flies on us. Except maybe on my brother's back.