At the end of September 2021, a netizen accidentally took a picture of this magical scene: a fly was playing with his head there. The fly did not react at first. When its head fell on the table, it was stunned, and its mind was full of questions, "What is this? Who am I? Where am I?" Many netizens sighed, this is the real headless fly!
In addition to this, many careful netizens have found that flies can continue to fly when they have no heads and survive for a long time. Moreover, flies do not die because of excessive bleeding, but because they have no head and cannot eat anything and starve to death. Why is this?
Before answering the above question, let’s first understand why flies like to twist their heads off?
Flies like to twist their heads off, but it is actually not correct. According to research observations, flies did not deliberately twist these heads off, but accidentally "rubbed" them off. This is very important to the behavior of flies, that is, the hand rubbing habit of flies, which is the standard configuration for every fly. and why does it like to rub your hands? I reviewed the information and summarized the following points:
The first point is to find the object, the courtship behavior of flies. Different animals in nature have different courtship behaviors, such as the peacock's opening of the screen, the gardener's bird 's nesting. Even when we humans look for a partner, we will show our excellent side to the fullest. The fly also has its own unique behavior, although it does not have a gorgeous appearance, does not have powerful weapons, and does not sing or dance. Therefore, the fly chooses a unique way of courtship, which is to "rub your hands".
According to the information we have reviewed, when scientists observe, during the breeding period, when female flies encounter the opposite sex, the frequency of hand rubbing will increase a lot, and use the behavior of "rubbing hands" to release the signal of their courtship. If a male flies accept courtship for catering, the male flies will also respond to it by rubbing their hands. In this way, they can be together happily.
The second point is to identify food. Many animals have a sense of smell on their noses, and some are induced by their tongues, such as snakes, and some insects sense food information by releasing some pheromones. Flies do not have these characteristics. Their tactile nerves and sensory nerves are all in their hands. The two hands in front of a fly are equivalent to our human noses. You can feel the taste of food. When the tentacles touch the food, it will analyze it.
But if the hand has other dirty things, block its tactile nerves, so that it cannot sense food or analyze food. So before it looks for food, it will clean up the dirty things on its hands by rubbing its hands. In this way, it can analyze food normally and use food normally.
The third point is to clean up the things on your body by rubbing your hands and reducing your own weight. There are a small spike in the front hand of the fly. When it touches the food, there will be a lot of food residues stuck to the hands. This increases the weight of the flies themselves. The important increase in itself seriously affects the flight efficiency of flies. Flies are a kind of person who survives the people's reactions by flying. When the party members are in danger, they can escape with this rapid reaction, otherwise they will only become the dead soul swattered by your fly.
Generally speaking, the behavior of flies taking action seems to be a very small behavior. In the eyes of humans, it is even a bad habit, but for flies, it has extremely important and extraordinary significance.
Why can fly survive by twisting its head off?
flies, so they can survive by twisting their heads off, which has a lot to do with its special nervous system . Our human brain is the most important neural center . Once the brain stops working, our body will stop moving and cannot breathe, and we will fall into an unconscious state. If we take off our heads like flies, we can directly say goodbye to the world. This is the common point among most vertebrates.
Flies have no spine animals, and the nerve center of the fly is not in the brain, or the fly has more than one nerve center. The nervous system of flies can be divided into central nervous system , sympathetic transverse system and peripheral nervous system. The central nervous system is composed of brain nerves, sublaxis ganglion and abdominal nerve cords. The main function of the nervous system is motor coordination, connection and sensation. sympathetic nerve is composed of oral nerves, middle nerves and complex nerves. Its main function is to control diet, breathing and other functions. The peripheral nerves are covered with the whole body of flies and play a certain conduction effect.
From the perspective of the nerve distribution of flies, even if you lose your head, it will not have much impact and will not threaten the life of flies. Someone said: Twist the head first, won’t you die due to excessive blood loss? In fact, it won't.
Fly's blood circulation system adopts a circulatory system, almost all blood is hidden in various parts of the body , and there is not much blood in the flies' head, and they will not die because they lose too much blood even if they lose their heads. You won't die because you lose too much blood, and you won't die because you can't breathe. Because the above mentioned that the respiratory system of the fly is not on the head or on both sides of the abdomen, even if the fly loses its head, it can still breathe normally. Therefore, we can often see that flies can move when they have no heads and fly around.
Although the headless flies can survive for a while, they will eventually die because the headless flies cannot eat. Therefore, the final result is that the flies cannot eat and starve to death. This is the fate of the headless flies.
Summary:
Flies do not like to twist their heads off, but because they accidentally rub their heads off when cleaning their bodies. The reason why a fly can survive without a head is because of the particularity of its nervous system and blood system, but it cannot survive forever and will eventually starve to death because it cannot eat.
