Black Soldier flies just wanna have fun
posted in Home Jabber on August 01, 2006
If there indeed is a god, and he's the archetypal white-bearded man constructing the various interworkings of our planet -- what the fuck was he thinking with the fly? One weird-ass creature, I tell you. In fact, ALL bugs are pretty weird. Maybe they were designed by god's goth brother. You know, the kind that scribbles quietly in the corner, cackling under his breath now and then as he scans his environs, only to go back to his huddled scratchings.
My compost bin is writhing with larvae. It doesn't smell at all, and I never put meat or dairy products in there, so I looked it up on the eenernet. Turns out they're Black Soldier fly larvae, which are a good thing. But how creepy is this: (quoted from here)
H. illucens cannot pupate in the bin environment, so after a couple of weeks as hungry larvae they will crawl out of the bin in search of soil or other protected area in which to move to their next life stage. Their mouth parts convert from chewing mandibles to a special digging tool with which they dig themselves a nice little "nest" in which to pupate. Pupation lasts a few weeks after which they emerge as flying adults.
Not only that, but once they're adults, they "have no functioning mouth parts, instead spending their adult lives in search of mates and reproducing". Now that's the life! They accumulate their entire lifetime food supply as a grub, then go out looking to fuck. And that's it. Man, I am so jealous.
2 comments on this entry
"They accumulate their entire lifetime food supply as a grub, then go out looking to fuck. And that's it. Man, I am so jealous. "
Nate, I am at university. That sounds like everybody I know.
Yeah, I guess I should have elaborated a bit on that.. ha!
Accumulating my entire food supply as a teenager would be fantastic -- then I could focus on, uh, other things, for the rest of my strange human existence.