Fly's

Redmoth27

Queen
Backer
Fly's will be in Freeplay Mode and will eat dead corpses. They may not seem that bad but you must keep their population down. If you don't they will breed and breed and they can be dangerous to the colony. When something is killed and when there's a high fly population, tons of fly's will start to swarm and rapidly eat all of the food from the dead insect or fish. If this happens you will have barely any food to feed your colony. So you should try to kill as many flies as you can. They only give you 2 food per fly though so you really can farm them.
 

Serafine

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Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Flies do not eat meat, only their larvae do.
Adult flies mostly consume sugars they get by visiting plants or licking up the secretions of aphids and other plan-/tree-sucking insects (honey bees do the same btw, more than half of the sugar that goes into honey comes from aphids and other bugs).
 

Serafine

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Ecosystem Beta Tester
Redmoth27 said:
Then why do you see them eating large animal carcasses?
They are laying eggs and licking off fluids and bacteria/funghi that are growing on the rotting corpse.
Adult flies cannot even chew, they only have a stamp-like proboscis. They spit enzymes on the food which can partially dissolve moist fleshy tissue so they can lick it up but it's not enough to consume an even remotely significant portion of a corpse.
It's the larvae which are doing the actual work (and they are true eating machines that grow insanely fast because they have to pupate before the corpse dries out and becomes inhabitable for them).

fly-proboscis.jpg

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Some flies like Tabanids and Blackflies have sharp knife-like mouth parts they use to slice through skin to drink the lympha and blood of larger vertebrates.
 

Raptorofwar

Queen
Backer
Did you know flies that land on a ceiling don't just fly upside down?
They fly the right way until they're immediately about to land. Then they swing their legs up, catch onto the ceiling, and kind of flip.

I think. I think I read this somewhere.

If I'm wrong, correct me.
 

Serafine

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Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
They also use the same evasion patterns fighter jet pilots do when trying to dodge missiles or their opponents in dogfights (but flies are much more maneuverable than fighter jets).
 

Redmoth27

Queen
Backer
But it would still be a good gameplay idea, right? You just need to change a few things and it would work.
 

Raptorofwar

Queen
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It'd be funny watching flies fly around with little machine guns in a dogfight.

(Someone out there, make it happen. Take my money.)
 

Serafine

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Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Redmoth27 said:
But it would still be a good gameplay idea, right? You just need to change a few things and it would work.
I like the general gameplay mechanic idea but it would work fine with just another competing ant colony (you don't need flies for it).

Also fly maggots are actually not the worst food for ants. Someone from the antkeeping Discord chat had flies lay eggs in one of his outworlds and when the ants discovered the maggots they went into army mode completely eradicating the entire maggot population in a matter of minutes.
 
Serafine said:
Flies do not eat meat, only their larvae do.
Adult flies mostly consume sugars they get by visiting plants or licking up the secretions of aphids and other plan-/tree-sucking insects (honey bees do the same btw, more than half of the sugar that goes into honey comes from aphids and other bugs).

Then why do those bastards bite the **** out of me whenever I go to the beach? :mad:
It can't be because they're trying to lay eggs. I've killed tons of flies with blood in them as well. I put those pests in the same group as wasps; nasty, useless creatures who were put here to cause pain. :mad:

My colony won't tolerate a single one of them even remotely close to my nest, we'll rip them to shreds and serve them in pieces to the queen
 

Serafine

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Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
He's actually not that wrong. I even mentioned that before (and no, these flies do NOT eat meat, not even their larvae do).
Some flies like Tabanids and Blackflies have sharp knife-like mouth parts they use to slice through skin to drink the lympha and blood of larger vertebrates.
 
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