[NatureNS] Cluster Flies inside

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From: Donna Crossland <dcrossland@eastlink.ca>
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 2020 19:45:31 -0300
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Well if you are going to go 'religious', I'll admit to being more 
entertained by the great masses of cluster flies than the rather dry 
sermon once the wood stove warmed up the little Anglican church.  (I was 
a kid then, but I might still be quite distracted by this great din of 
cluster flies that darkened a stain glass window high in the peaks, 
noting that they were drawn to some colors over others... etc.  But I'm 
unlikely to return.)

Donna

On 2020-04-18 9:18 p.m., Fred Schueler wrote:
> On 4/18/2020 6:22 PM, David Webster wrote:
>
>>      Neither Cluster Flies nor Asian Lady Beetles contribute to 
>> Climate Change and that, if not taken seriously, will wipe out 
>> everything. I suspect Cluster Flies are good pollinators of early 
>> flowering plants. And when they die their bodies likely sustain some 
>> organisms.
>
> * I was going to remark on Cluster Flies as biocontrol agents of 
> invasive alien Earthworms. It's very interesting how some folks freak 
> out when any Insect - Cluster Flies, Box Elder Bugs, Ladybirds, or 
> Polistes wasps - want to share their house for the winter. I was once 
> present when a clustered cabin was warmed up for the first time in a 
> winter, and the Cluster Flies buzzed out about 3 metres, and then fell 
> onto the snow where they fed quite an assembly of Chickadees and other 
> birds.
>
>>  Some decades ago (about 1970 ?) we were overrun by Earwigs and they 
>> are inclined to climb. Open a door and a shower of earwigs would 
>> fall. So I looked into the feasibility of control by shocking.  A 
>> liquid had seeped from many joints and they proceeded to carefully 
>> clean all of this away, by moistening a tarsus with mouth parts and 
>> then wiping down all joints in legs and antennae. So I scrapped that 
>> project because I realized that in many ways they resembled humans 
>> and should not be tortured.
>
> * Earwig (english substantive for Forficula auricularia): an 
> omnipresent reminder that humanity is not acclaimed as the dominant 
> species on the globe, a conclusion recorded in the Earwig’s neatly 
> folded dorsal Scriptures and revealed by its inscrutable appearance 
> wherever it is not wanted. "The earwig can, at the end of its ‘earthly 
> course’ rise up to kinship with God and eternal life." Friedrich 
> Nietzsche, 1881, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, p 47.
>
> fred.
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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