Bug invasion expected to increase

Are

sick of flies?

Pest controllers warn the warm, damp weather in many parts of the country is going to bring crazy numbers of insects over the next month.

A perfect storm of drenching rain and seasonal sultriness is tipped to provide ideal breeding conditions for a proliferation of flies, mosquitoes and other bugs like ants.

Pest Management Association of New Zealand vice president Dr Paul Craddock said flies were climate-driven creatures with a life cycle of about a week.

“My prediction would be, the fly season is going to go pretty crazy. We’re going to see a lot of flies around, and also mosquitoes and other general insect activity like ants.

“There’s going to be a lot of standing water around in drains and places like that, so mosquitoes are going to be particularly bad.”

While it was hard to predict exactly how bad the season would be because of localised conditions, Craddock - an entomologistsaid people should expect many more flies buzzing around their house.

“Generally speaking, it’s going to be worse than usual.”

Houseflies, blowflies, mosquitoes, fruit flies and midges were all expected to multiply this month along with ants, which were anecdotally on the march in the top of the south.

Another reason to resist climate change

Craddock said climate change-driven changes in weather patterns could influence the fly season.

“That means the fly season is potentially longer, or we’re seeing problems in places people haven’t had problems before - places in the deep south of New Zealand like Bluff or Invercargill.”

Despite New Zealanders’ almost universal hatred of flies, Craddock said the insects

“You were simple creatures devoted to feeding and breeding.

Houseflies, blowflies, mosquitoes, fruit flies and midges are all expected to multiply.

“They are just like any other biological organism trying to make their way in the world. There’s nothing particularly malicious in what they’re doing, they’re just trying to take advantage of their environment.

“They’re a fascinating creature. They’ve evolved over many millions of years to do what they do, and they do it very, very well.”

Facts about ants

Sourced from the New Zealand Science

Kids website here are some fun facts about ants. Ants are a social insect from the family Formicidae. They evolved from wasp-like ancestors around 110-130 million years ago after the rise of flowering plants.

• Antarctica and a few remote islands are the only places with no indigenous ants.

• It e stimated that the total number of ants alive in the world at any one time is between one and ten quadrillion (10,000,000,000,000,000).

• Ants are believed to contribute up to 25% of the total biomass weight of land based animals. That’s about the same as the total biomass of the entire human race, or equivalent to approximately 1 million ants for every human.

• Ants can build small colonies of less than 100 ants through to very large colonies that occupy large areas and contain millions of individual ants.

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