All is fair in love and war...

Few are there who have not heard this expression. This statement has always made me feel uncomfortable, and I would like to share my discomfort with you. I have thought of a paraphrase that makes me feel better, i.e. "ALWAYS fair in love and war". If taken seriously it would result in higher level of sincerity in love, and there would be no war.

A critical revisitation of tamarisk

As a causal observer one could conclude that there are only 2 species of Tamarix: a big tree with no leaves or little bushes, looking all about the same, with minute pointed leaves. Where in fact there are over 50 species worldwide, but none is native to America. All of the serious invasion is caused by one species Tamarix ramosissima, which was known before as T. pentandra or T. gallica in the older books. I recently had a trip on Amtrak from Riverside to Kansas City. Near the road bed there were green bushes all the way through Arizona, Texas and almost to Kansas City, and I learned that this greenery was chiefly T. ramosissima. My surprise was that I didn't realized that it has moved way up into Central Kansas. I would suppose that this dispersal was caused by the train movement carrying seeds. One could refer to it as a ribbon of tamarisk.
A tree form with no leaves is called T. aphylla (from Greek "a" - no, "phylla" - leaf). In Southern California climate conditions do not support the germination of T. aphylla seeds.

Tamarix aphylla at the UC Riverside, west of Fawcett lab building

T. aphylla does not produce a lot of flowers, but T. ramosissima is very floriferous, and heavily visited by honey bees. The extracted honey is dark in color and in the 1930s it was only sold as low price honey, known then as "baker's honey". Although today is the opposite, it is available at specialty stores at the elevated price.

A little dip into the flies among us - part 2

After getting rid of screen doors we get occasional "uninvited guests" - small reptiles getting lost and dying behind furniture. The ability to detect cadaverin odors by blow flies is remarkable - they can detect it by just few molecules and find the way in the house to oviposit on the carcass. A few blue bottle flies (Calliphora vomitoria) will appear in the house some time later and we would often wonder how did they get in. Subsequently during house-cleaning we would find the remains of a small dead animal and several empty pupal cases around it. That answers the question where flies came from. Interestingly enough is that the emergence of these flies occurs simultaneously as it is well-known in marine turtles. In marine turtles it is an auditory signal that builds up in a complete batch of eggs, whereas in flies simultaneous emergence thought to be a response to such stimuli as temperature and possibly humidity. There is a specialized organ in some flies in frontal portion of the head, which works like a balloon with hydrostatic pressure and serves to rupture the pupal case first, and secondly helps to emerge to the surface for species that pupate in the soil. It is called ptilinum.
In nature when a larger animal is decomposing there would be produced about thousand of maggots, when they are ready to pupate they burrow down into the soil from 1 to several inches deep. During warm weather after 1 to 3 weeks they are ready to emerge. At least two different occasions I have observed the emergence of blue bottle flies, at a spot where dead animals had decomposed several weeks earlier. What I have seen was gathering of dozens of active male flies before the major volume of emergence began. During this emergence many hundreds of early imago appeared, and their sex ratio seemed to be fairly equal. And here are the details: adult males that appeared before the major emergence were searching for the females. This was accomplished by pulling upward the head of emerging fly and very soon to be freed from the ground. Then they took to the air, the male holding the head of young imago with his legs and flying away with it. Sometimes within 10 to 20 feet away male would drop the imago and return to the emergence site to grab another one. I determined that the dropped fly was a young male not suitable for copulation. Many of the flying couples would disappear out of sight without dropping young imago, and I assumed that the transported imago was a female. There must be some pheromone that would indicate the gender of young imago to the adult male within a few seconds.

A little dip into the flies among us

I would like to share some personal experiences and dip into reproduction and behavior of our Dipterous neighbors.
Lets start with kitchen. We have a little plastic 1 gallon container where we collect any remainder of food for either compost or chickens. If we don't empty it daily we soon get an accumulation of Drosophila also known as pomace flies. It is better to avoid the common name fruit fly as it refers to a serious pest in pre-harvest fruit. The name Drosophila originates from Greek "dros" meaning dew. Dew could refer to the little droplets of moisture that are formed on the surface of fungal mat, on which the Drosophila flies feed. There is some sexual dimorphism, males have a dark tip on the abdomen and are usually smaller. The females tend to have several dark bands across the abdomen. Males are constantly searching for the receptive females, running after them. The copulation will last probably about 10 minutes, interrupted by a few intermittent movements of male before the contact is terminated. The one species D. melanogaster seems to be dominant in our area, however there are other species mixed with it, especially a larger species with conspicuously longer wings. Since they do not alight on one's flash, we don't feel them as annoyance, but inversely we get a feeling of unobtrusive life around us.
In our urban neighborhood the frequency of house flies is pleasantly low. We gradually eliminated the annoyance of screen doors. House flies typical breeding medium is horse and cow manure. We compost all our kitchen waste and house flies do not appear to be breeding in that environment. I spent one year in Australia car-camping out most of the time. The well-known bush fly became so numerous and aggressive to alight on your face in open-range cattle country that we had to wear hat with a vale all day long. So we got to know what the common phrase "Australian salute" meant (when you have to wave your hand in front of your face all the time). I.t was pretty difficult to distinguish bush fly from the house fly. In recent years in Riverside I had few occasions when a fly would head directly to my nostrils, and it made me wonder that if we have an incipient population of bush flies here.

Additional notes

Often times in flight, Nitidulidae of genus Carpofila could be mistaken as Drosophila.
these two are found in the same environment and both feed off of decomposing fruit.
Over the years I have enjoyed seeing Drosophila lazily meander around the compost container in my kitchen. Now and then I have seen a UFO that was Drosophila size but had a different flight pattern. This insect Inscribed circles in the air around a horizontal axis, where as the The Drosophila have a steady more or less horizontal flight. My curiosity led me to catch one in an insect net to examine it. To my surprise, this insect was no fly but a beetle. During this time of year figs with large orifices are frequently infested with large numbers of these Nitidulidae beetles.

Continued in part 2..