Flies in Texas: Are there more right now and why?
ABOVE: KXAN Meteorologist Nick Bannin previously spoke to Texas AgriLife Entomologist Wizzie Brown about flies in Texas.
(NEXSTAR) — Summer's still got lots of heat to bring Texas — but have you noticed an extraordinary amount of flies this year? Or even just in the past few years?
Recently, a Central Texan posed the question "What's the deal with the flies?” in the Texas subreddit, and many fellow Texan Redditors chimed in to commiserate.
"Every restaurant, every grocery store, it is constant in a way that I can’t remember ever experiencing until this past year," wrote the original poster. "I can hardly get a moment’s peace in any of the usual places I go to eat (or those I visit while traveling, for that matter) without constantly waving my hand over the table like a maniac to protect my d--n food."
Well, turns out it's been a problem for at least a few years. Last summer, KXAN Meteorologist Nick Bannin spoke to Texas AgriLife Entomologist Wizzie Brown about the presence of flies in Texas — including how to combat the problem.
Brown said that Texas tends to have flies year-round, due to the state's warm climate.
"They’re more active during the daytime, you don’t see them so active at night. So when it really starts to warm up with temperatures that we’ve been having recently, that can actually speed up their lifecycle," Brown said. "So it takes a shorter period of time from them to go to the egg to adult stage. And so we can really start getting large numbers quickly."
And extreme heat caused by climate change will likely only make the problem worse. There's a bounty of evidence to suggest that many insects, including flies, would benefit from even warmer temperatures. Back in 2019, Scientific American reported on research which predicted that even though 40% of Earth's insect species would be wiped out in a few decades, houseflies would actually be expected to experience population growth.
Other recent data from Scientific Reports showed that warmer temperatures also expand an insect's habitable areas — meaning that more flies will likely be seen in more places as the world's temperatures climb.
As far as ways to keep houseflies at bay, Brown recommends routinely removing trash from your home and placing it in outdoor garbage cans. Moreover, Brown says you should be cleaning garbage cans and recycle bins with dish soap to remove potentially fly-attracting odors.