Category: Animals

Flies are not as frequent an annoyance as they used to be. Cleaning-up of surroundings, the use of flypaper and fly swatters and the various insect repellents are serving to eliminate them. Such flies as the common housefly, stable flies, greenbottle flies, bluebottle flies, blowflies, fruit flies, and others feed on contaminated garbage, and may spread viruses and germs.

Such filth-feeding flies have been incriminated in the spread of epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea, cholera, infectious hepatitis, and other diseases.

A female housefly can lay as many as 2000 eggs during a lifetime—i.e., the fly’s lifetime. In warm weather these eggs hatch in from eight to ten hours and the new flies go right on breeding.

The lungfish has small gills, but must have access to air or it drowns. About once every twenty minutes it comes to the surface to swallow a gulp of air, passing the gas into a pair of air bladders or lungs that open into the gullet. Among the many other unusual features of structure found in the lungfish are a pair of nostrils that open from the exterior into the mouth; in this respect lungfish differ from almost all other kinds of fishes. The lungfish has a long body with long dorsal and anal fins that seem to come together in a sharp point to form the tail. The pectoral and pelvic fins are merely long, tapering ribbons. Scales are small and completely embedded in the skin. In color it is brown or tan with black or dark brown mottling.