The Great Australian Fly
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00:00No creature on earth walks all over us quite like the fly.
00:20And for all our batting, biting, swiping and spraying, we're still covered in them.
00:28I'm Louie the Fly, I'm Louie the Fly, straight from rubbish tip to you.
00:34Stop squatting for a moment and take a good, hard look at the fly.
00:48I love the way they just, you know, rub their hands together.
00:54Flies do far more good than they do bad.
01:00Flies are on the front line of scientific research.
01:03They pollinate more widely than bees.
01:06They solve crimes, heal the sick, are a food of the future.
01:13And the start of a love story.
01:17Oh, and flies are born entertainers.
01:21Why not book them for your next party? They'll be there anyway.
01:26Like it or not, this little insect looms large in our past, our present and our future.
01:36It's time we swatted up on the great Australian fly.
01:52Christine Lamkin is an entomologist or insect specialist at Queensland Museum in Brisbane.
02:05She loves flies to death.
02:09I, in my career as an entomologist, have probably killed thousands,
02:17probably hundreds of thousands of insects, even hundreds of thousands of flies.
02:24Christine's life's work is to name and classify the many flies native to this wide brown land.
02:36Most of our flies are actually Australian. They're uniquely ours.
02:43Australia's 30,000 or so fly species have evolved over millions of years on our ever-changing continent.
02:51Most are still a mystery to science.
02:55We probably will never finish.
02:58We certainly won't finish before some of them go extinct.
03:02Flies extinct in Australia? It's absurd.
03:07That's because we're only recognising a handful of fly species, the ones that pester us.
03:14There's one somewhere near you right now.
03:26In most places in the world you'll find one that's outside and one that's inside.
03:31And most people around the world think that they're the only two flies that exist.
03:36In fact, there are three types of fly in Australia no-one can escape.
03:43The house fly.
03:46It arrives at your home uninvited, eats everything in sight, and then shits on the sugar.
03:56The green blowfly.
03:58A member of the large blowy family.
04:02Often pretty flies with some ugly habits.
04:07And then meet the native bush fly.
04:11It's an outdoorsy type that loves your tears, sweat and saliva,
04:16and then sits on your back waiting, frankly, for you to poo.
04:21Well, I don't trust flies, I don't trust them.
04:24It's not because they eat poo.
04:29Eating poo ain't a crime.
04:33If you've been out in the bush, and I'm sure you all have,
04:36there is no way you can exaggerate the horror of bloody flies.
04:46Go on, convince us there's something to admire about a fly.
04:52That's a job for James Woolman, entomologist and lord of all flies.
04:58I wake up in the morning and I just can't wait to get stuck in.
05:06Flies are James' passion.
05:09What he doesn't know about them hasn't been discovered yet.
05:13Here's the European blue bottle, Califera versina.
05:19They have an iridescent blue abdomen, actually,
05:23which is a little hard to appreciate when they're in the cage like this.
05:27They look more black, but under the microscope they're very impressive.
05:37All flies have an inherent aesthetic quality
05:41that most people can never appreciate
05:44because they never stop to look at them closely enough.
05:48Flies are amazingly engineered.
05:52They have evolved over millennia to become incredibly successful.
05:59The name says it all.
06:01The fly's wings beat 200 times a second,
06:04as fast as a Formula One engine travelling at top speed.
06:08In one second, the fly can travel 300 times the length of its own body,
06:13turning faster than a fighter jet.
06:16And your fly brain has less computational power than a toaster.
06:24They're not smart, but boy, can they get around.
06:30The fly thrives in every climate, on every continent.
06:35And quite a few of them need no more than you and poo.
06:44Long before Europeans arrived,
06:46Aboriginal Australians learned to outwit flies by always moving on,
06:51leaving waste and flies behind.
06:56The Aborigines clearly accepted flies as an important part of the natural world
07:03and didn't see them as a nuisance.
07:06The first white explorers, on the other hand,
07:09had no tricks to outsmart the fly.
07:12In 1688, William Dampier is besieged by bush flies.
07:17They will creep into one's nostrils and mouth
07:21if the lips are not shut very close.
07:24200 years later, the bush fly greets Ernest Giles like a lost puppy.
07:29We can't help eating, drinking and breathing flies.
07:34Bush flies descend on humans and animals to dine on their bodily secretions.
07:41Their other main source of protein is dung.
07:45It's great tucker and doubles as a breeding ground
07:48for the maggot or baby fly.
07:52In Australia, pre-white settlement, dung is in short supply.
07:57Marsupials produce only small, hard, dry droppings.
08:03Until suddenly, everything changes.
08:11Europeans and their livestock start splattering fly nurseries everywhere.
08:21The flies are out before you hit the ground.
08:23I believe that.
08:26In 1788, the First Fleet delivers six horses,
08:3144 sheep, 19 goats, five cows and two bulls.
08:38Once Europeans became settled,
08:40we had chattel producing enormous volumes of faeces, of dung,
08:46which then became an extra breeding medium for the fly.
08:52The numbers of this type of fly just increased dramatically.
08:57In less than a week, one cowpat can grow 2,000 new flies.
09:08As Australia's settlements build, so do the flies.
09:14But bush flies don't come inside.
09:16It's a new arrival buzzing around backyard dunnies.
09:21The housefly, one of the world's most ubiquitous travellers,
09:25has hitched a ride with the convicts.
09:29The colony is now plagued by houseflies and blowies indoors
09:34and bush flies outside.
09:38Five sixty, five sixty.
09:40The face of Australia is changing
09:42and that face has more flies on it than ever before.
09:47The flies are everywhere.
09:49They're everywhere.
09:51They're everywhere.
09:53They're everywhere.
09:55It's a growing population holding its own
09:58and that face has more flies on it than ever before.
10:03Is the Australian drawl shaped by the bush flies' crawl?
10:08Legend has it, Australians adapt to speak with their mouths half shut
10:13to avoid swallowing flies.
10:16The more we learn about the flies' filthy habits,
10:20the less we want them joining us for dinner.
10:23This is one of the places where he breathes and feeds, if you let him.
10:28Then he wipes his dirty feet on your food and you eat it.
10:36Houseflies and blowies are everywhere.
10:39We're constantly eating something touched by a fly.
10:43They walk across our food using the fly version of taste buds on their feet, savouring as they go.
10:57If something's good underfoot, they release their feeding tube or proboscis.
11:04At the end is a pad that works like a sponge, sopping up liquid.
11:11But a sugar grain is too big to suck up.
11:14The fly regurgitates liquid down its proboscis to soften it, otherwise known as vomiting.
11:23Flies on your food can mean members of your family ill in bed.
11:28So keep all food covered against flies.
11:34Health authorities of the 1940s warn against flies spreading disease.
11:43These wind invaders are bringing our waste back to us, then letting loose from both ends all over our food.
11:52So why aren't we dropping like flies?
11:57Flies are covered in germs, which of themselves could potentially be dangerous.
12:04But people have evolved, you know, have developed over time a resistance to germs.
12:11Flies do not really cause problems to us.
12:14There's no scientific evidence that they've ever caused any real problems to us.
12:19People malign flies terribly.
12:21You know, they think at best they're a nuisance and at worst they're something that can kill you.
12:26The reason that I don't trust flies is because of how they go like this all the time.
12:36Multi-eyed Machiavellian little bastards.
12:43When a fly rubs its legs together, it's not plotting against humankind, it's cleaning.
12:51Flies are fastidious.
12:55Their bodies are covered in hairs sensitive to touch, taste and smell.
13:06The smallest fragment of gunk can block their fine tuning.
13:12The eyes, with thousands of separate lenses, also need to be kept clear to register the slightest movement.
13:22The fly is a cleaning machine.
13:26But it's not the only one.
13:28Once I was just by myself in the backyard and a fly landed on my cheek
13:57and started walking across my top lip.
13:59And just before I went like that, I just had this weird thought where I thought,
14:04I could catch that fly.
14:05And just as it went under my nose, I went, and sucked it up my nose.
14:08And I'm like, oh!
14:11And I caught it and I shouldn't have.
14:14However hard you try, you won't kill all the flies.
14:21And even if you do, there will be more.
14:24Flies are being carried your way on warm winds, sometimes for hundreds of kilometres,
14:30to make your home theirs.
14:34This is more than just annoying for Kelsey Miller.
14:38Flies leave her in a cold sweat.
14:41I can't even really cope with seeing them on television.
14:49Kelsey is entomophobic.
14:51She has an irrational fear of insects.
14:55She avoids being outdoors, but indoors can be tricky too.
15:02So this is where we eat dinner.
15:04And even just one insect on the wall, small flies, it's not even bothering me.
15:10I can't cope. It makes me uneasy and nauseous.
15:14And I can't continue eating or doing anything until I've killed it.
15:18And it's dead.
15:20I had a horrible experience in here one time.
15:23A really big blow fight.
15:25We had a real moth problem.
15:27And there were just moths everywhere in the cupboard.
15:30It's just impossible.
15:32Like, anywhere I go in that garden, there's just various types of insects.
15:36And mainly the little flying ones.
15:41It's probably why I don't go in the backyard so much.
15:43There's just the risk of the insects.
15:51Backyards are alive.
15:54Especially when there's been a death.
15:59Carrion-loving flies will arrive within moments of a creature's final breath.
16:08Most of them are females, looking for a good place to lay their eggs.
16:13And what better spot than a still, warm body cavity?
16:21These large flies are female green blowflies.
16:29Pestering them are male small hairy maggot blowflies.
16:35The females kick them away, but these males are unflappable.
16:42Clearly, size doesn't matter to blowfly boys.
16:46They'll try anything to win the girl. Any girl.
16:52In their defence, flies are lucky to live a fortnight.
16:57It's not long to get it on.
17:00The problem here is that these flies are different species, so they can't mate.
17:05But that's no deterrent.
17:09If it smells like a female fly, it's worth a shot.
17:13No matter how big she is.
17:17There is method to this madness.
17:20The closer you look, the more impressive the fly's sex life becomes.
17:31Time for another trial.
17:34James Wallman and research assistant Stephanie Jones are trying to understand how flies flirt.
17:42To do this, they're making fly porn.
17:47Individuals can display what you might regard as micro-personalities.
17:54The small hairy maggot blowfly, for example, is particularly interesting
17:59because it has this very well-developed courtship ritual.
18:04Love is fickle in the fly world.
18:07Outside the petri dish, females have plenty of choice.
18:11A male needs to stand out from the crowd to pass on his genes.
18:16The best boogie wins the girl.
18:19He's doing his little circuit around the female there.
18:23She's meanwhile pretending to look completely disinterested by cleaning her face.
18:29Yeah, no, he's gone off the boil again.
18:33Yeah, no, he's gone off the boil again.
18:36There are some similarities between flies and humans when it comes to courtship behaviour.
18:43Males and females have their game plan when they're approaching their mate
18:48and how they decide to go about impressing that partner.
18:52As soon as you put more flies together, there will be more courtship behaviour.
18:57The males do just get a bit more motivated when there's more females.
19:03They signal to the female by raising and lowering their ornamented forelegs.
19:10It's like a salute almost.
19:12Hello, I'm over here.
19:16Ah, little handies again.
19:19Here we go, he's getting interested.
19:21Yes.
19:22Yes.
19:23When you see, you know, an exciting new type of behaviour in a fly,
19:28you can't help but become excited by it.
19:32You think to yourself, boy, you know,
19:34isn't that somewhat similar to that behaviour I saw in humans just recently?
19:42A fly's sex life is very little different from our own, in fact.
19:46You know, Mr Fly is interested in finding a partner.
19:50His urge to reproduce is very great, as is hers,
19:54because flies don't live for very long, so they have to make hay while the sun shines.
20:00Although, you know, we don't have females laying eggs in dead bodies, do we?
20:19Back at Possum Central, a day has passed and eggs have hatched into maggots.
20:25The maggots start out the size of a rice grain,
20:28and they grow by the hour as they gorge on guts.
20:33What looks like eyes are breathing holes that can suck air
20:36even when the mouthparts are buried in entrails.
20:43It's one of the many charms of the maggot.
20:46They breathe through their bottoms.
20:50This crafty adaptation also means maggots can feed 24 hours a day,
20:55looking at flesh with their hooked mouthparts.
21:01In 36 hours, maggots can reduce a dead possum to little more than a skull.
21:08If we were without flies, we would be covered in refuse.
21:13Rotting vegetation would be everywhere.
21:17We would be in no end of trouble.
21:20And the place would smell a lot worse than it does now.
21:26But once the carcass is gone, what becomes of the maggots?
21:32They've pupated. Their outer skin hardens to form a shell.
21:37But to get to this stage of their life cycle, these insects have defied the odds.
21:43Most get gobbled up by parasitic worms, mites, beetles and birds.
21:49And that's just as well.
21:53Their reproductive capability is staggering.
21:56You know, Mr and Mrs Fly, if they're able to reproduce
22:00such that all of their offspring are then able to survive
22:04and produce offspring themselves and so on and so on
22:08without any of those offspring dying,
22:11within a year you would have a bundle of maggots the size of the earth.
22:19The pupil cases contain a soup of fly DNA,
22:23which miraculously transforms into a fly.
22:31A bladder in the fly's head is used to pop open the shell.
22:42A fly is born.
22:44It's a buzzing baby glowy.
22:50MUSIC
23:09Pumping blood into its wings,
23:11the newborn stretches to full size before its body hardens.
23:19It's gone from egg to adult in little more than a week,
23:23relying on nothing more than waste.
23:27Now that's sustainable industry.
23:32Forget cows, we should be farming flies.
23:41Dave Sheldon is not unlike a fly.
23:44Dave, how you going, buddy?
23:46He gathers what the rest of us consider waste
23:49and transforms it into something useful.
23:52Thank you very much.
23:54Hi-ho, silver.
23:57He'll take any old crap, I mean carp, and turn it into food.
24:03Food for flies.
24:09Dave is a maggot monger.
24:13He fattens flies on fish heads, collects their maggots
24:16and sells them back to the fishing fraternity as bait.
24:22The fly I use is called the blowfly, Paliflora stygia.
24:28Dave's fly shed is its own unique hell on earth,
24:32for anyone bar Dave.
24:35Kind of like it in here.
24:39It's a different place to be, there's nowhere else like it.
24:43And yeah, they look after me and my family, these guys,
24:47so I appreciate them.
24:52It takes a special man to tolerate this version of the home office.
24:57Flies don't smell too bad, it's just the poo.
25:02It's like caramel.
25:04An off caramel.
25:07But I reckon if we licked it, it would be quite sweet.
25:11But we ain't gonna lick it, no.
25:18I pretty much pioneered professional maggot breeding,
25:22and as far as I know, I'm the only one in the country.
25:28Dave is a pioneer in his field,
25:31but he's not the first to see the potential in flies.
25:38Kids have long toyed with the fly.
25:44Scientists have too.
25:55Flies have inspired advances in genetics,
25:58aeronautics, neurology, immunology.
26:03And they can juggle.
26:08But that's not all.
26:11Nurse Catherine Brennan turns up at a patient's home
26:15with a box of hungry flesh eaters.
26:18Hello, Claire. I'm well, how are you?
26:21Very well, thanks, Catherine.
26:23Good, I've got your delivery.
26:26Catherine uses maggots to clean chronic wounds.
26:30They eat dead flesh, promote new growth and kill off bacteria.
26:36I suffer with pulmonary hypertension,
26:39and the hospital found that I wouldn't be able to tolerate an anaesthetic,
26:44so this is why I've had to go for using maggots.
26:48This is what they look like, Claire.
26:50Can you see them? No, I can't. They're really tiny.
26:53I think the greatest impediment in maggot therapy
26:57is what is known as the yuck factor.
27:00Claire Carter is keen to have maggots feast on her ulcerated ankle.
27:05Her only other option is amputation.
27:09In her situation, you've got to love maggots.
27:14And just check that there aren't any escapes.
27:18They are that delicate that you can't walk on them or anything like that.
27:23They'd all just be squash.
27:25I don't do a lot of walking. OK.
27:28Catherine's medical maggots will stay with Claire for three days.
27:33They won't eat all of her.
27:35They only like the dead bits.
27:38The trick with this therapy is sourcing maggots from the right fly.
27:45The wrong kind of fly is the sheep blowfly that eats living flesh.
27:51Landing in Australia on the back of the country's first marina in 1796,
27:57it soon becomes our most destructive fly.
28:02Farmers retaliate by dipping sheep in pools of organophosphate.
28:08This toxic cocktail is effective until flies develop resistance.
28:14The sheep blowfly remains a major pain in the bum.
28:20What's the best word to sum up a bloody fly?
28:23Persistent.
28:24Who asked?
28:27As the Second World War ends, our battle against flies ramps up.
28:35Across the country, indoors and out, toxic chemicals are sprayed with abandon.
28:42Our war on the fly becomes more dangerous than the fly itself.
28:47You can keep flies down by spraying with a fly-killing solution.
28:52Spray it where flies settle most.
28:54It leaves a film which soon kills any flies which settle.
28:59Don't waste it on thin air.
29:08Many of the more lethal fly-killing products are now museum pieces.
29:14Around the 1910s to 50s, there was a real diversity, pesticides, insecticides.
29:20And I think there was an innocence and an ignorance about the effect of those products.
29:24They all have fairly chirpy names like Must Die and the Daisy Killer,
29:29which looks like a beautiful field of flowers but in fact contains arsenic.
29:33You'd put water in it and the arsenic and water would seep through the little centres of the flowers.
29:39Apparently flies are attracted to flowers and to yellow.
29:42So this was used in domestic situations and one would think would be quite dangerous with little kids around.
30:12BANG! BANG! BANG!
30:33It's 1954. The Queen is soon to visit and the colony is abuzz.
30:39But flies must be dissuaded from soiling the regal cheek.
30:46Government scientists madly experiment with chemical cocktails.
30:51They need a repellent that's safe for Her Majesty's skin.
30:57And in time, they have their eureka moment.
31:00A chemical that scrambles the fly's ability to sniff out human odour.
31:08Personal fly repellent is invented.
31:15The Queen refuses to touch the stuff and survives her encounters with the fly using a deft royal wave.
31:24And so do the many other flies.
31:30And the many notable guests who follow.
31:39But fly repellent has an important role to play for Australians and tourists alike.
31:54The best part of Australia are the flies.
32:01Get off!
32:06In 1957, the creators of Louie the Fly put the fun into fly spray.
32:13That's me folks, Louie the Fly.
32:17What's this? More tin? Oh no!
32:22I'm Louie the Fly, I'm Louie the Fly, straight from rummy's tip to you.
32:27Animators Geoff Pike and Cam Ford are there for Louie the Fly's birth.
32:35Louie the Fly, I'm Louie the Fly, straight from rubbish tip to you.
32:42Their brief? To create a despicable but charismatic fly urging punters to knock him dead.
32:49There was a lot of animation in those days and he was the first to have a personality.
32:58I think you've got to look to Hollywood for the cliché.
33:02It was the Edward G. Robinson gangster of the period. He's the closest I can think of to Louie the Fly.
33:07Their weapons? Disease germs. Their rackets? Ruin your family's health.
33:11All our components, off-site, were called Louie.
33:15Public enemy number one.
33:18Louie, Louie the Kimp. He was Louie the Fly.
33:22I'm bad and mean and mighty unclean, afraid of no one.
33:27Louie is acknowledged as the son of adman and author, Bryce Courtney.
33:32The third commercial I ever wrote was Louie the Fly.
33:36And I believe it's in the American Advertising Hall of Fame as the longest running commercial ever.
33:41But all it is is a story.
33:43The truth is we don't really know where Louie came from except it was a creation of a lot of people.
33:57Somebody must have written the first script. Now Bryce says that he wrote that script in the back of a cab.
34:03He did bring it in the back of a cab, frankly.
34:06Hi, Australia. Remember me? I'm talking to you, fly.
34:09Louie has metamorphosed across 50 years of television, adapting with science and the remarkable abilities of modern day fly sprays.
34:20I would say he was probably the most successful animated character that this country's ever seen.
34:27Only because we can't get rid of the bloody flies, no matter what we do.
34:32That's right, I'm the bad guy, the one called Louie.
34:36But there are things we can do.
34:39This is obvious to migrant and entomologist George Bournemissa.
34:45He travels from war-torn Hungary and arrives in 1950s fly-blown Australia.
34:54He steps off the ship at Fremantle and straight into a cow pad full of maggots.
35:00It's a giant step for mankind versus fly.
35:05When he saw all the cow pads in the paddocks, he realised something was very different from Europe.
35:14George makes it his mission to spoil the fly poo party.
35:24George is convinced the answer to the Australian bushfly problem lies under a pile of poo in Africa.
35:32He just needs to convince the authorities.
35:36Some of them who thought that my story is very convincing, they would still say that it is too good to be true.
35:45In 1965, George finds what he's looking for.
35:50But can these tiny white eggs solve Australia's fly problem?
35:55George is determined to find out.
35:57As a professional entomologist, you can spend your whole life trying to find out, you know,
36:03more and more about what's going on in creatures other than ourselves and only ever get to scratch the surface.
36:10But the wonder of it never ceases to amaze you.
36:21Australia has a small army of bug enthusiasts.
36:24Each one dreams of being the first to discover a previously unknown insect.
36:35What do you do when you get home? Put it in the freezer?
36:38This time they've come together at Mount Mee, southeast Queensland.
36:43It's a national park famous for rare plants and iconic animals.
36:49But what about the tiniest of inhabitants?
36:52But what about the tiniest of inhabitants we so often overlook?
36:59Here's a group of humans with a keen eye for detail.
37:04Their fearless leader, native fly crusader, Christine Lamkin.
37:10We ask interested public whether they would be willing to come into one place
37:16and spend usually a 12-hour period looking at that particular habitat or environment.
37:24Flying. They're flying in little groups.
37:28There are so many insects in Australia that no one person can be an expert of everything.
37:35That expertise has to be spread out.
37:38It's not like anything I've seen before, so I suspect it's a new species.
37:43We know 95% of the mammals on the planet,
37:47but the spiders, the centipedes, the millipedes and the insects,
37:51there is just so much more to be done.
37:55There are 7,800 species of fly in Australia described.
38:01We estimate that's only a quarter of what's out there.
38:06This is a malaise trap. It's one of the traps that we use to catch insects.
38:10I use these to catch flies.
38:15We've got some lovely big cerembicid.
38:18Some beetles floating on the top with flies.
38:21One of the good things about studying flies is that we don't have animal ethics issues.
38:28It is considered amongst most scientists that insects don't feel.
38:33We use cyanide, so by the time I get them home,
38:36they haven't got really hard and crisp, and I can still pin them.
38:45I'm just trying to see if we can see any more.
38:48We're trying to look where the sun is shining on the flies, and there is one there.
38:56For Christine, it's not just a love of flies that brings her here.
39:01Christine caught her partner Noel at a bug catch.
39:07Now they travel the country chasing flies together.
39:19We've seen so much of Australia.
39:22We've seen places that most people never see through the insect collecting.
39:26That's a real boon.
39:32You get yours?
39:33No.
39:34Can you get yours?
39:38Noel is still waiting for Christine to name a fly after him.
39:45I think that our society, the way we live these days, we are so dissociated from nature altogether
39:52that so many of us don't stop and look.
39:57You can find beauty in the smallest things.
40:04Once kids were into flies.
40:07Of course, they've got better things to do these days than lose themselves in the natural world
40:12or see anything else other than that bloody iPad.
40:16Put it away for a second.
40:18Look at the view.
40:19Why do we take you on holiday?
40:24Then again, those outdoorsy bush flies aren't in their faces anymore.
40:29Which brings us back to George Bournemissa.
40:35From a lab in Pretoria, South Africa, George is breeding the best fly-killing machines in existence.
40:42And they're ready for dispatch.
40:45In their various labs, they proceeded to find a method by which they could pack the eggs
40:53and send them totally sterilised without distributing diseases or anything like that.
41:01Back in Australia, there are thousands more cowpats every minute.
41:06Trillions of maggots and quadrillions of flies.
41:12For George's colleague, John Theon, a solution can't arrive fast enough.
41:18We would get a telegram informing us on a Tuesday
41:21that there were 3,200 eggs arriving of a particular species on Thursday night at 6pm.
41:27So in the previous two days, four of us would roll 3,200 damn little balls of dung by hand.
41:35Then when those eggs arrived, we would create a cavity at the back of a government pen.
41:40Then we'd very carefully put an egg in the back of a government pen
41:44Then we'd very carefully put an egg into each of these little balls of dung,
41:49close them up, put them under soil and hope to hell a beetle emerged eventually.
41:57The beetles are coming to Australia.
41:59It's pandemonium. The beetles have just touched down for the first time in Australia.
42:05Stop. Not those beetles.
42:08These beetles.
42:10Dung beetles.
42:12African dung beetles.
42:16We bred them into some hundreds, thousands and eventually got that species out into the paddocks.
42:23Can the dung beetle really shut down the fly poo party?
42:28These beetles can get rid of a cowpat in a very short period of time.
42:35It's quite magical.
42:38Dung beetles are little bullshit dozers.
42:41And despite appalling suspension, they've become a rare example of great biological control.
42:48No shit.
42:53George Bournemessa died in 2014, leaving us with a lot fewer bush flies.
43:01We outdoor addicted Australians now take this for granted.
43:12John Feehan, meanwhile, is beetley on.
43:16These little babies are my bread and butter.
43:20When a farmer orders a batch of beetles from me,
43:23I point out to that farmer in a joking fashion that when the beetles arrive after that date,
43:30he's not ever again allowed to drive over any cow dung in his paddocks.
43:37Because each time he does, he will squash 50 of the beetles that I've sent him.
43:45As for the bush flies, they've had to find new ways to survive.
43:51Tony, through. No, Tony, go through the...
43:55Come on, go...
43:57You're on, Tony.
43:59He did it in rehearsal.
44:01He's an artist, you can't constrain him.
44:04To be honest, he didn't do it in rehearsal. He didn't even come to rehearsal.
44:07He's very unprofessional.
44:15The truth is no one's ever taught a fly anything.
44:19Ants, snails, fleas, spiders, even worms learn, but not flies.
44:29The juggling, it's an instinctive thing.
44:34Tony, just... He went through, did you see that?
44:37I don't know if you saw it. It was out... I trained a fly!
44:49But just because they're a few chops short of a barbie doesn't mean they can't hold down a real job.
44:56Flies are natural healers.
45:00They've been treating Claire Carter for a good 72 hours straight.
45:04Oh, there they all are.
45:06Where are they?
45:07There's a few now dropping to the ground.
45:09That's exactly what we want to see.
45:12Some nice fat maggots.
45:14That's a very good sign, Claire.
45:16Is it? Oh, that's good.
45:17Yes, that is excellent.
45:19They're coming out now because they've done their job.
45:21They've eaten all, as much as they can...
45:24Oh, I see.
45:25...of the dead tissue in the wound.
45:27There's a lot of nice, healthy pink tissue down there now.
45:33It's never going to win the glamour stakes,
45:35but as antibiotics get less effective, maggot therapy is looking better and better.
45:41I don't know whether we'll achieve complete healing,
45:44but that's definitely what we're aiming for.
45:46Well, if it's going to help heal up my ulcer, I don't mind what I do.
45:51I don't mind what I do.
45:53Across Australia, flies are serving the nation.
45:59In Perth, they're solving crime.
46:02What we're doing here is we're setting up a cordon.
46:05It's a temporary cordon that you would see normally at a crime scene.
46:09Ian Dador is a forensic entomologist.
46:13Part of his job is to teach students
46:15how to read the story of a murder as told by a maggot.
46:20They have to tell me what happens
46:22and what an entomologist should and shouldn't do at a crime scene.
46:25Ian goes the whole hog with his job, even providing a victim.
46:30Here's one he prepared earlier.
46:33We've got a dead body and the entomologist is called in.
46:37Why would an entomologist be called in?
46:39The insects don't own the body.
46:41Right.
46:43Insects offer a suite of clues at a murder scene,
46:47a time of death and sometimes cause of death.
46:51What we also can do with maggots is we can extract things from them.
46:55We can extract DNA from them, so the host in which they're feeding.
46:59We can extract gunshot residues.
47:05All right. What's this called?
47:09OK, so if we see a maggot mass, we have to look at it with this, yes?
47:15So the only places that could be are where?
47:19Here?
47:21OK, so we'll have a look at what it is.
47:25OK, it's 28.5.
47:27I don't know what's in the back here.
47:30OK, the back's really hot.
47:3242.6.
47:34So there must be a maggot mass in there.
47:37If you put your hand there, you can actually feel the heat coming off.
47:41Yeah.
47:44What do you need samples of?
47:46The adult flies.
47:47All the different flies that are flying around, yes?
47:50There's this sort of netting where you put it over the top...
47:54..and you drop it and you see if you can catch them like that, OK?
47:58Not so successful that time.
48:00So the alternative is?
48:02Sticky trap.
48:04Sticky trap.
48:06When Ian isn't netting flies on pigs,
48:09he's picking maggots off murder victims.
48:12As one of Australia's few forensic entomologists,
48:16he's good value at a crime scene.
48:19The body was discovered lying in the entry hall.
48:23In the case of Anthony Ford, it seems he died in a house fire,
48:28but not according to the maggots.
48:30We know from research that within half an hour of you being dead,
48:34you're going to have flies visiting you,
48:37at least in Australia.
48:41In this case, fire appears to have destroyed all evidence.
48:46There was not much insect material on the body
48:49when we arrived on the Sunday morning.
48:52But Ian finds a quilt near the corpse.
48:56The quilt didn't burn.
48:59The quilt didn't burn because the quilt had a retardant in it.
49:03Maggots in the fabric lead Ian and police to a precise time of death.
49:09I was able to use evidence at the crime scene immediately,
49:14which the police could use to question suspects with.
49:18As a consequence, the suspect admitted to doing the crime.
49:24It's an ordinary day's work for Ian,
49:27but this is no career choice for the squeamish.
49:30So remember, everybody, to take a maggot.
49:34There's no gloves, so you can pick them up,
49:37but you can wash your hands afterwards, all right?
49:39You don't even eat them, they're so clean.
49:43Does anything disgust me? Yes.
49:46But it isn't anything to do with decomposition
49:49and it isn't anything to do with the job I do.
49:52So I guess what disgusts me most is baby poo.
49:59Back at the Queensland bug catch,
50:01night has fallen and things are getting interesting.
50:08It's starting to build.
50:10A light sheet attracts all variety of strange insects and people.
50:16Oh, I'm trying to pick beetles
50:20and trying to not pick any stinky bug
50:24because there really is a nasty chemical
50:27and it would leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
50:32We've got a crane fly here.
50:34Now, these are very tricky flies to actually pin
50:37and one of the only ways that we've found to pin them
50:41and one of the only ways that we've found to pin them
50:44and keep all six legs because they fall off
50:47is to actually pin them alive and freeze them.
50:51Now, this is actually a lacewing.
50:56You don't see them very often, but they do come into light sheets.
51:00Christine is always surprised at what turns up at a bug catch
51:04and worried about what doesn't.
51:07Our use of insecticides within the agricultural system
51:12may have affected populations not just of flies
51:15but of all sorts of things that we never meant to get rid of.
51:20Many ancient micro-worlds may have lived and very quickly died
51:24before we stopped to marvel at them.
51:30Have you ever seen a camel fly?
51:33A camel fly is like as big as a mouse.
51:38They're pretty nasty things.
51:40They can ruin a day.
51:42They can ruin a bit of romance.
51:46I think if I remember rightly.
51:50The next morning, Christine is back at her day job
51:53in the Queensland Museum.
51:56Christine's other interest is evolutionary biology.
52:01She's studying the history of flies to glimpse their future.
52:06I've got the evidence to show that here in Australia,
52:11my flies like climate change.
52:14They can cope with changes in the environment very quickly
52:18because of that short lifespan
52:22and because of the number of progeny they produce.
52:25We may not survive as humans, but the flies will.
52:32Flies are adaptable, plentiful and nutritious.
52:36For our own survival, it makes perfect sense to eat them.
52:41A German backpacker lost for 18 days in Outback Queensland
52:45has told police he survived by eating flies
52:49and other insects.
52:51It appears he's lived on some very small number of provisions.
52:55Once they run out after the first few days,
52:58he says he's been living on flies.
53:00Apparently protein content is quite good
53:03and can sustain some sort of life for a while.
53:09Could flies and their maggots really be a food of the future?
53:13Dave Sheldon hopes so.
53:15My maggots go all around the country.
53:19We supply probably 100 shops.
53:23Dave's maggots are 73% protein and full of omega
53:27from a breeding cycle that puts your lamb chops to shame.
53:32In the mornings and late afternoon, they do all their breeding.
53:36It's just happening everywhere.
53:38Everywhere you look, the orgy of flies.
53:41They're kind of like us guys, in the morning and in the evening.
53:46As you can see, there's quite a few in here.
53:49I don't know, 200,000, 300,000, an army.
53:54It's an army that can feed an army.
53:58Today, maggots are used as sustainable protein
54:01for poultry and fish farms.
54:04By 2050, they could be feeding 9.5 billion humans.
54:09Sound nuts?
54:11Apparently they taste like pistachios.
54:15They're good for us and for maggot farmers.
54:19I don't get many colds or anything.
54:22It might be because I stay away from the general public,
54:29but, yeah, maybe it's to do with maggots.
54:34But there's another job flies do that's critical to our survival.
54:39They're part of the love story that feeds the world.
54:44Flies pollinate.
54:47They feed on nectar and pollen,
54:49and in doing so, fertilise flowers and crops.
55:05As bee colonies collapse around the world,
55:08growers are relying more and more on flies.
55:13Dave Sheldon's flies now have a higher purpose.
55:17The pollinators call me Pollinator,
55:19which is different from the maggot breeder.
55:23Just maybe I'm going to be...
55:26going to be the help they need.
55:30Yeah, through the use of my flies.
55:35Insects are the food of the future.
55:38We don't know what's around the corner.
55:40Things are changing.
55:44And, yeah, I could be like Coles or Foodland.
55:48Yeah, with the truckloads of maggots.
55:52As it turns out, there are things to admire about flies.
55:58They're really not so different from us.
56:02They can be appalling and beautiful.
56:07Their lives are industrious and brief.
56:11And yet, they've been here longer than we can fathom.
56:16When we've all breathed our last,
56:18one little creature will just be getting started.
56:22So swipe all you like.
56:25There's just no escaping...
56:28the great Australian fly.
56:37FLY
56:40FLY
56:42FLY
56:44FLY
56:46FLY
56:48FLY
56:50FLY
56:52FLY
56:54FLY
56:56FLY
56:58FLY
57:00FLY
57:02FLY
57:05FLY
57:09Tens of thousands of eyes?!
57:11You've got too many eyes!