I usually like to photograph insects and spiders in their natural habitats. I do come across the lifeless shells of many insects, but avoid photographing them because they just seem so, well, lifeless! It also feels somewhat disrespectful to them. Anyways, I make an exception here because flies are a pain to photograph alive, and this one seemed pretty well preserved. It was still soft and even flexible when I found it resting in a dish of lawn fertilizer in the garage. Maybe the fertilizer had something to do with the preservation…who knows.

The neat thing about these flies is that they are an integral part of a speedy decomposition process. They lay their eggs on dead animals (and people if there happens to be a human corpse laying about) and on the wounded flesh of anything living as well. The maggots feed on the dead and decaying tissue. The interesting thing is that they will not eat living tissue which makes the larvae of this fly very valuable in larvae therapy.

For those who don’t know, larvae therapy is the medical use of maggots to help with the cleaning of wounds. Click for more details about Larvae therapy.