Flies love to feast on putrefying, decaying flesh...with a side of dog poop.
There's good reason to swat a fly off your food. Every time one lands on a new food source, it regurgitates a special digestive liquid to tenderize the meal and lick up the juice. That means bacteria from its last stop just landed in your potato salad.
Flies can eat anything from filthy garbage to filet mignon.
But their offspring may have even more voracious appetites.
Maggots. Fly larvae look disgusting, but they act as nature's recyclers, breaking down dead animals.
After just a few days of gorging, the maggots retreat into a pupa, the end stage of a life cycle that goes from egg to adult in as little as a week.
If only human teenagers grew up that quickly.
