Insects

So That Explains It

Nearly every year since 1999 Donna and I have been running an event for the local Miata club called the Bug Splat. Regular readers know what I’m talking about because almost every year I have blogged about it here. If today is your first visit, read a few and come back.

It has seemed to me that with each passing year, the quantity of bugs smashed on the front of Miatas each summer has steadily decreased. I know this hasn’t really bothered the participants, they are in it mostly to be led on a drive around the local back roads with the ice cream finish, but it has bothered me. I have contacted an Entomologist at a local university, changed routes several times and even tried adjusting the starting time to optimize our interactions with insects, all to no avail.

Turns out that it doesn’t matter how often I monkey with the setup of the Bug Splat Rally, because German scientists have actually proved my Diminishing Bug Hypothesis – Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers

Another Exciting Day at Work

Two of the Valve Store’s engineers were standing outside my cubical discussing a housefly problem. The engineer with the problem had tried a couple things with little success, so the other says, “Have you heard about air-power gun that shoots salt that kills them.” “Nooo..”, came the reply. “It is sort of like a shotgun water pistol that fires table salt.”

I hadn’t either, so I looked it up. It’s called Bug-A-Salt, cute, huh? So, the housefly host says, why don’t you get a couple of them and bring the boys over (non-fly guy has 5-year old twins) and they can hunt the flies down. I’ll offer up a bounty. At this point I jump in with, “Hey, I want in on this bounty. How much is it?” The answer is $50 a ton. This is a perfect answer because the kids will jump at the size of the bounty and not really have a sense of how much a ton is.

I on the other hand know how big a ton is and how big a fly is, so I’m no longer interested in hunting houseflies. But I am now curious as to just how many flies it would take to get a ton of them. A quick search turns up these figures in a couple places, so they are going to be accurate enough for our little math problem.

Typical housefly: Adult size: 5-7 mm = 0.005-0.007 m Adult mass: 12 mg = 0.000 012 kg

1 Imperial Ton = 1016.05 kilograms, so we divide 1016.05 by .000012 = 84670833.333, or just a mere 84.7 million flies in a ton. Not nearly as many as I originally thought, I would have guessed some number followed by about 10 or 12 zeroes.

Next I guess we will also need to figure out how big a bucket we are going to need to hold ton of flies. I couldn’t find a volume for a house fly, so I’m going to take a SWAG and say if the fly is 6 mm long and it is roughly cylindrical shape of about 2.5 mm in diameter. This gives me, fudging for wings and legs, let’s call it 30 cu/mm per fly. So the 84670833.3333 x 30 = 2540125000 cu/mm. Converting to cubic feet gives us 88.90437499965 or a slightly overfilled 3-yard dumpster from California Waste Services.