Flies! (the complete program) — with Scarabs Sharon Collman & Dave Pehling

This past April, we had a multi-topic program into which Sharon and Dave attempted to fit their fly talk, but it didn't really fit! This time they are determined to give us "the whole nine yards", going into much greater detail than they had time for in April.

Sharon Collman and Dave Pehling have a basic introduction to the order Diptera, "To Know a Fly." Dave and Sharon, long-time Scarabs and retired WSU Cooperative Extension educators from Snohomish County, will team for this presentation. Flies have only two wings but diverse body forms and every imaginable lifestyle: from house guests to bloodsuckers to predators to aquatic rat-tailed maggots. They are used in medicine, as food for poultry and, yes, people, and as biological control agents. They even save wildlands by making life miserable for us destructive humans.

Flies have, arguably, the greatest diversity of ecological roles of any insect order, and their order Diptera is considered the most actively evolving and evolutionarily plastic of all the orders. Anyone who doesn't want to be an ignoramus about living things, must know about flies! Don't miss this one!

Scarabs' new Zoom Czar, Matt Neumann, has created a special link you can click to get to each month's Scarabs session, regardless if the specific meeting ID changes. You should get this link (or it will become visible) if you RSVP here (passcode is 816620). If you attend by phone, you'll need the old-fashioned numerical Zoom code, and anyone doing that should refer to their print newsletter (or, if not a subscribing member, contact us well ahead of time please!). Go to Zoom not long before the meeting starts, otherwise the link may not be active. And if anything about this new system misfires, tell us so we can trouble-shoot for next time!