{"id":1752,"date":"2011-11-29T00:30:55","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T05:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2011-11-29T00:30:55","modified_gmt":"2011-11-29T05:30:55","slug":"tuesday-tunes-i-am-the-fly-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biodiversityinfocus.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/29\/tuesday-tunes-i-am-the-fly-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Tunes – I Am the Fly – Wire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Ryan<\/a>It’s been awhile since Tuesday Tunes featured a song about those beautiful bi-winged bugs the flies, so I think we’ll rectify that!<\/p>\n

This isn’t the first time that Wire has been featured here on Biodiversity in Focus, with their song Outdoor Miner previously making the list<\/a>. That song featured a relatively accurate depiction of a leaf miner fly, probably in the family Agromyzidae. Today’s song features flies a little closer to home, repeatedly talking about a fly in the ointment and flies causing more disease than fleas.Well, that and a divergent wasp dealing with plate-glass<\/a> (side note: Flickr is fun).<\/p>\n

So what might the flies be? Well I’m going to go with the common house fly (Musca domestica<\/em>) for the fly in the ointment, just based on ubiquity and the odds of one ending up in someone’s moisturizer\/tonic\/soup. How about the flies causing more disease than fleas? Well, fleas are vectors for a number of diseases, with the big one being the Bubonic Plague. With an estimated 75 million people killed during the Black Death pandemic and another 12-15 million more killed in epi- and pandemics up until the mid 20th century, I think we can confidently put a back-of-the-napkin (BOTN) estimate of 100 million deaths attributable to fleas in recorded history. Tsetse flies (Glossinidae, 23 species total, 2 of which are of medical importance to humans) are vectors for the trypanosome that causes African Sleeping Sickness, which was listed as killing 48,000 people in 2008. A BOTN gives me an estimate of 100 million deaths in the last 2000 (50k x 2000 years, assuming smaller populations but higher mortality rates), so Tsetse flies are a possibility. Our next suspect might be the common house fly from earlier. Known to spread diseases such as typhoid (BOTN = 20 million deaths out of 450 million in past 2000 yrs), cholera (BOTN = 30 million deaths out of ~600 million in past 2000 yrs), and dysentery (BOTN = 50 million deaths out of 1.5 billion in past 200 yrs) among others, the house fly may be a dark horse in this race.<\/p>\n

Of course, the best bet are the mosquitoes. With the genus Anopheles<\/em> (the vector for Malaria) responsible for easily 100 million deaths in the past 200 years, not to mention the deaths attributable to Yellow Fever & Dengue Fever (Aedes aegypti<\/em>) and “minor” diseases like West Nile Virus and Japanese Encephalitis (Culex<\/em>). I think it’s pretty safe to say that mosquitoes are the most deadly insect known to man!<\/p>\n

Anyways, that was a pretty morbid tangent from the song, so let’s just listen to some music shall we?<\/p>\n

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