SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Blowflies don’t sweat. However, they have raised cooling by drooling to a high art.
In hot times, these sturdy, big-eyed flies repeatedly release — and then retract — a drop of cooling saliva.
Denis Andrade reported the trick January 4. He was speaking at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. He studies ecology and evolution at the Universidade Estadual Paulista. That’s in Rio Claro, Brazil.The fly’s technique isn’t sweating. That is what keeps people cool. Sweat evaporates taking a tiny amount of body heat with it. Blowfly droplets put the cooling power of their natural fluids to use in a different way, explains Andrade.
The saliva hangs on a fly’s mouthparts. There, the droplet starts to lose some of its heat to the air. When the droplet has cooled a bit, the fly then slurps it back in, Andrade and…
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