BS: Are all maggots male?

Subject: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Once Famous
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 08:54 PM

The ones laying on their stomachs are male. The ones on their backs are female.

Look carefully.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Peace
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 09:22 PM

Hard to tell in this photo . . . .

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 09:27 PM

No.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Once Famous
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 10:29 PM

Peace, Look carefully I said!

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Gurney
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 10:35 PM

I've never had to sex them. I have bred them for fishing bait, and it has been their business to decide on their gender.

The flies that walk on your butter- after walking on the dogshit outside- are fertile egglayers. Could be hermaphrodite or female, I wouldn't know.

The maggots in Peace's photo are still on the food. They look like blue-bottle maggots. Housefly maggots are skinnier.

'The Life of the Fly' by Fabre will tell you all you want to know.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Peace
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 10:38 PM

Martin, I am so confused.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Peace
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 10:44 PM

That picture is from here.

Gurney, how big do they get?

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Once Famous
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 10:46 PM

Peace, that's not a very nice question to ask a man.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Peace
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 10:57 PM

LOL

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Gurney
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 11:36 PM

Peace, that picture, on my 17" screen, comes about 110% as large as life. Just a fraction bigger than normal.

Then they turn into a bullet-shaped 'caster', which hardens into a chrysalis, which pops it's top and out comes the fly.
Tracking them from there is the problem, and why I can't sex them.
The timing of this process, at various temperatures, is of the utmost importance to CSI operatives.
Maggots feed by spitting out Pepsin to dissolve the meat, and sucking up the resultant soup.

Where do flies go in winter? They die, 99.9% of them. The chrysalis doesn't, it can be frozen solid and survive, and it is up to a foot underground anyway.

I'll bet we have some disgusted lurkers by now!

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 11:41 PM

Yes, but 888 billion flies can't be wrong.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: GUEST
Date: 26 Feb 06 - 11:52 PM

if you squeeze and roll a maggot long enough between your fingers
sticky white fluid will pop out,

could be male then !

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 12:48 AM

Okay, I am officially grossed-out now.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 12:59 AM

By the way, if most of the flies die in winter, where do all the live ones come from that spring to life in hordes 10 minutes after the woodstove is fired up in the old fishing camp in mid-January?

You drive up in the sled, jump off and unlock the door, throw some kindling in the stove an light it, and before you've got your skidoo suit off, there's a hundred of the big blue-assed bastards buzzing against the window.

Even though you sprayed the place with RAID before you left last time...

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: John O'L
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 03:34 AM

Spontaneous generation.
I'm not kidding. There are certain activities which will create favourable conditions for this. Getting into your pyjamas is another. There may have been no evidence of flies at all, all day, but if you get into your pyjamas and make a move towards the bed, one of those dopey buzzing blowies will suddenly explode into life straight out of the ethers. No maggots required.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Gurney
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 03:58 AM

Cluin, thats what the book says. I haven't actually frozen flies, but maggots and chrysalis can take it. They hatch fast, it is the digging their way to the surface and doing their makeup that takes time.


They don't really do makeup. They develop a bulge between the eyes to butt their way to the surface, and that has to be brushed out and closed up before they can see properly.

The ones at your camp are probably exhausted because they've been following you fishing socks from home.....


Fleas are even faster. A gravid female flea jumps off your cat, lays eggs and dies. If you go away for the weekend in warmer weather, the extra warmth caused by the windows being closed causes the eggs to hatch. When you come back, and the little sods are on your legs within 6 paces.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 04:02 AM

I've noticed that... even in the depths of winter, all you have to do is get out a tin of white gloss paint and there will be flies.

For years I had a fly encased in gloss paint on my bedroom windowsill.... a windowsill that had been painted in February in an unheated bedroom.

LTS

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 04:11 AM

What about squats and pinkies then?
G

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: gnomad
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 05:05 AM

In cold weather some anglers warm their maggots so they wriggle more and make better bait. They do this by popping them into their own mouths for a while.

Gross-out now complete.

I'm sure that isn't why it's called coarse fishing, but it ought to be.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: the lemonade lady
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 06:41 AM

Ask Schantieman, he has races with his kids! I think the maggots sometimes win!

sal

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Peace
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 10:16 AM

Thanks, Gurney. Neat stuff to know.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: GUEST,Joe_F
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 09:32 PM

It is impossible for a species to be entirely male, because males are merely females' way of inseminating other females. There are, however, a few species that are entirely female (parthenogenetic): some lizards, and quite a lot of rotifers. The lizards are an evolutionary dead end, but the rotifers, it seems, are not. For some biochemical speculations on why we can't get away with that, see www.mcb.harvard.edu/meselson.

--- Joe Fineman    [e-mail]

||: Suck, squeeze, bang, blow. Internal combustion makes it go. :||

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 09:38 PM

"What about squats and pinkies then?"

You behave yourself! There are ladies present.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Gurney
Date: 27 Feb 06 - 10:08 PM

Giok, squatts and pinkies are smaller maggots, used as groundbait/burley normally, as hookbaits on those desperate days when only the heretical fish are biting.
I only bred big meaty hookbaits, locally called 'Gozzers'.

If Schantieman wets his maggots, he can have really exciting steeplechase races with them. Wet maggots can climb walls!
Unfortunately, they instinctively go in every available direction, because even maggots don't like maggots' company.

Joe F: "males are merely females' way of inseminating other females"?
What an interestingly butch picture you conjure up. Do they tie the males up first, or use a mechanism, or something?
"Make her pregnant, or taste my barbed wire whip!" snarled the dominatrix!

Just pulling your leg, mate. I understand that you meant a species' way of inseminating females.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: GUEST,Joe_F
Date: 28 Feb 06 - 10:23 PM

Gurney: No compulsion is ordinarily needed. Females merely launch males into the world, like heat-seeking missiles, leave them to their own devices.

--- Joe Fineman    [e-mail]

||: Most people don't think, but are anyway. :||

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 12:01 AM

And others catch them.

Life is just a big game of catch.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 12:02 AM

For males.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Gurney
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 02:51 PM

Joe F, I just KNEW there was a device involved.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 02:52 PM

Clinton Hammond is male.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 03:56 PM

Hence the bright plumage.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Cluin
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 03:57 PM

And ritual courting dance.

Subject: RE: BS: Are all maggots male?
From: Alan Day
Date: 01 Mar 06 - 05:53 PM

Taking into consideration that all babies are pretty.
Do you think that female Bluebottles look over the side of a fishermans can of maggots and say "Oh look at those little loves in there,Its making me all broody"?
Al