Houseflies & Evolution

A Portland Story

The housefly flew five stories up and trespassed into our apartment through a two-inch window opening. It must have felt lie a foreigner in a new country or a prisoner for no apparent reason. The fly had left its gang swirling on the sidewalk, its natural habitat for spring and summer. I am sure you are all familiar with those thermal-like invisible upward tunnels where flies exist for one to three months after emerging from larvae deposited in sidewalk cracks, behind garbage cans, wherever rotting food is available, particularly meat, or defective sewer systems.

Its presence in our apartment disturbed our peaceful retirement. The wife, more rational than I could ever be, sounded the alarm: “these disgusting flying monsters are carriers of disease.” She proceeded to manufacture a weapon to withstand the viral attack. A former corporate girl, the wife drew a strategy based on careful observation and note-taking, which I could decipher from a distance to consist of letters, numbers, mathematical signs, perhaps even formulae based on differential calculus. Yes, the method Isaac Newton used to measure the forces of rotation and gravity that eventually defined the shape of the Earth. Her eyes followed the fly’s circles, triangles, and rectangles around the apartment and proceeded, as already mentioned, to create the weapon with my unread literary section of the Wall Street Journal. It looked like a bouquet of newsprint, headlines, photos, graphs, and semicolons. The handle she reinforced with Scotch tape.

Where are yoi, kept whispering the lady.

I, a pacifist, didn’t see the intrusion as an act of war, and set out to settle the contretemps diplomatically. I advised the fly to flee, appealing to law-abidance, in English, Spanish, and, just in case, in Latin: Delinquens iura nostra, delictum habes. Sequere me quaeso atque abire in viam. Finis fabulae — by trespassing you have infringed on our rights and committed a misdemeanor. Now, if you please, follow me to the window and leave as you came in. End of story.

Question marks appeared in my wife’s pupils followed by exclamation marks. I tried reasoning with her; a death sentence struck me as a bit severe. Maybe we could Google some compound that would induce the fly to a one-minute comma, facilitating its deportation in a humane way. “Say,” I said, “in one minute, our fly would rejoin its kind down the street.” As I spoke, I thought, what if its sense of direction is altered by the venom, and the fly goes the other way?, and by an error of judgment gets killed trying to join a different, a ferociously territorial fly-gang. My dormant journalistic instinct alerted me to a potential ground-breaking scoop. I could see the headline: War Erupts Between Rival Fly-Gangs on the Sidewalks of Portland. To add scientific trivia, I could mention global warming precipitating the emergence of the flies and their exponential numbers.

At that precise moment, a BANG, and that was it. The fly was dead on the floor. I got the magnifying glass to examine it. Houseflies, Musca domestica, showed a simple body plan with a head, thorax, abdomen, and transparent wings. AI indicated that it had specialized mouthparts for sponging liquids, compound eyes, and wings adapted for flight. In comparison, Homo sapiens have a very complex body structure with a large brain, bipedal locomotion, highly dexterous hands, and a sophisticated vocal apparatus for speech.

The comparison led me to a meditation on the evolution of both species. Homo sapiens belongs to the family Hominidae within the order Primates. Modern humans evolved around 300,000 years ago. The genus Homo itself, which includes species like Homo erectus and Homo habilis, originated approximately 2 to 3 million years ago. On the other hand, houseflies, Musca domestica, scientists estimate to have evolved 65 million years ago, just after the extinction of dinosaurs.

The seniority of the fly on planet Earth posed another strictly human dilemma: how to rid ourselves of the dead. I thought it would be adequate to use an organic pod, maybe a green bean pod, and do a simple burial in one of our six planters. Maybe a ceremonial Gregorian chant. Before I got a chance to outline my plan, my wife had picked up the Musca domestica with a pair of pincers, deposited it in a bag with the remains of lunch, and off it went down the chute.

Raul Guerrero is the author of various books, including the novels INSOLENCE and Murder and the Dog, and nonfiction books, including Cronica del Corazon, a mini encyclopedia of cardiac care in Spanish, and Downtown Miami History.