The Chris Effect

Flies, I often complain, are annoying. I’m sure few people would disagree. Flies are the only animal – or insect on the planet that has a weapon specifically designed to kill them: the fly swatter. Or course, there’s also the bear trap, but when’s the last time you used one of those to kill a bear? And the elephant gun, well…dammit, I know what I’m talking about!

Anyway, I believe that flies are, while not useless, irrelevant. They may serve a purpose, being at the bottom of the food chain and all, but I think you could completely wipe them out without destroying our fragile ecosystem.

Flies are unquestionably at the bottom of the food chain. This isn’t because they’re small; there are many smaller creatures on this planet. How about bacteria? The thing is, no animal on the planet has a diet solely of bacteria. Nothing hurts and catches bacteria. Nothing stalks or traps it. If anything, bacteria is pretty high on the food chain. Flies aren’t on the bottom because everything else eats them either; it’s because of what flies eat: shit. Honestly, does it get any lower than that? Shit doesn’t eat anything, therefore it’s not alive, and is not part of the food chain.

Oh, but wait, EVERYTHING eats flies? Well then we can’t just chuck them out window! A huge part of everyone’s diet will be gone! Not so. There are over a million known species of insects throughout the world. KNOWN species. And some scientists estimate there may be ten times that number waiting to be found. In fact, ninety-five percent of all living creatures on Earth are insects. If you take flies out of the food chain, I severely doubt that any other animals will starve to death, what with millions of bugs crawling around every acre of land. The food chain will not collapse.

Okay, hold on then. Don’t flies do other things like eat garbage and help the environment and stuff? Well chew on this: an estimated ten percent of the all the animals on the planet are ants. And get this, another ten percent is termites. There’s your decomposition right there. Flies don’t even make the count.

Here’s another fun fact for you: it’s estimated that houseflies carry around 1,941,000 different kinds of bacteria. KINDS of bacteria. Flies are carrying around nearly two million species on their backs. And with our culture being one of germaphobes, it’s a wonder why we aren’t developing ways to eradicate the species.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

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This entry was posted on January 29, 2010 at 00:24 and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.