This is a photo of my desktop screen. There is an obnoxious fly in my office who keeps landing on the screen (circled in red).
I don’t know if it’s just showing off or it’s too stupid to perceive the image it’s strolling on.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
ick … Why?
If you weren’t imprisoning every spider you came across, the fly would’ve already met a similar image, albeit with a very real spider. ;)
So… where are the photos?
You take dozens of photos of creepy arachnids. And brag about feeding them flies. But that means that somewhere in the bowels of UMM must be some unpaid undergraduate, hoping for an education, who has to instead tend to vats of rotting meat.
In order to have a steady supply of spider food, there has to be slabs of putrifying maggot overrun meat or refuse. Dozens of maggets crawling about, allowed to mature, mate only to be whisked away to some spider induced death. Where are those pictures?
These are vegetarian flies — no rotting meat. Just lots of bottles of fly medium, which looks a bit like oatmeal, that has maggots writhing in it.
To the visual system of a fly, a 2-dimensional image of a spider on an LED screen probably looks absolutely nothing like a real spider. For one thing, the scan rate is slow enough that the fly probably just sees a tracking dot. For another, the phosphors in the screen are tuned to match the receptors in the human eye, but IIRC, flies see in a rather different spectrum.
Are there smart flies out there? I was not aware of that, if that’s the case…
The desktop looks suspiciously neat. I can barely see my desktop photo under all those icons.
Dunc: I hope PZ has been able to buy a new monitor in the past 15 years. One without phosphors and a tracking beam.
Those things did last a long time though; I still see them getting dumped in alleyways.
The “ephemeral fly” comes to mind.
I have a fly that somehow got into my monitor screen and died there. I cannot remove it.
Because it doesn’t fit on the scanner?
I guess since encountering a spider web is ALWAYS fatal, they never learn to fear webs, making the web a good investment for the hungry spider. Makes sense the fly would not avoid the spider, only we have the overview of seeing the results.
–Capt Obvious