Why do flies love to “rub hands”?

When people feel cold, they warm up by rubbing their hands.

If you look closely at flies, you can see that flies also rub their hands, and they not only rub their hands, but they also rub their feet, heads, faces, and wings.

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Why are the flies doing this? Is it also for heating?

According to Jinglong’s editor’s understanding, there are three main reasons why flies “rub their hands”.

 

1. Keep your sense of taste sensitive

Flies don’t have noses, and they rely on the taste and touch sense organs in their legs to distinguish the taste of food

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The food of flies, such as feces, kitchen waste, etc., will make their legs stained with mucus. If the legs are covered with dirt, it will affect the judgment of food. In order to correctly distinguish smells, flies have to rub their

hands and feet frequently to ensure the sensitivity of their taste organs.

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Just like when people have a cold and stuffy nose, eating Mama is not fragrant. In order to keep the nose clear and smell the smell, we often blow our nose.

2. Easy to fly and land

On each paw of the fly, there is a hook and paw pad. The hook paw can grasp objects and use it to support the body; while the glands on the paw pad can secrete lipid liquid to increase adhesion. This is why flies can hang upside down on smooth glass and not fall off.

Flies fly everywhere, and it is inevitable that there will be a lot of things on the legs. If these things are not cleaned up, the weight of the fly will increase, and the adhesion of the claws will also decrease.

This is undoubtedly a bad thing for flying animals like flies.

Therefore, in order to facilitate the flight, the flies must also rub their hands and feet frequently to clean up the contaminated food.

3. Attract the opposite sex for mating

In the fly world, there is a “market” for female flies that rub their hands and rub quickly.

During the mating and breeding season of flies, female flies will release their own pheromones by rubbing their hands. When encountering male flies, they will speed up rubbing their hands to secrete more pheromones to attract males to mate with them.

From the above perspective, flies are still a kind of clean guy~


Post time: Jul-08-2022