Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Erica McAlister
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Erica McAlister
Dr Erica McAlister, of London's Natural History Museum, talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the beautiful world of flies and the 2.5 million specimens for which she is jointly responsible.
According to Erica, a world without flies would be full of faeces and dead bodies. Unlike, for example, butterflies and moths, whose caterpillars spend their time devouring our crops and plants, fly larvae tend to help rid the world of waste materials and then, as adults, perform essential work as pollinators. Yet they are rather unloved by humans who tend to regard them as pests at best and disease vectors at worst.
2019 is international Year of the Fly, and dipterists and entomologists around the world are working to raise the profile of the many thousands of species so far known to science.
Erica tells Jim about her work in the museum, cataloguing and identifying new species either sent in from other researchers or discovered by her and her colleagues on swashbuckling trips around the world. Modern gene sequencing techniques are revealing new chapters in the life histories of species, and her collection of 300 year old dead flies continues to expand our knowledge of how the world works.
Perhaps in the future, she argues, we will all be eating pasta and bread made from fly-larvae protein, or using small tea-bag like packets of maggots in our wounds to clean out gangrenous infection.
View all episodes
By BBC World Service
4.4
940940 ratings
Dr Erica McAlister, of London's Natural History Museum, talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the beautiful world of flies and the 2.5 million specimens for which she is jointly responsible.
According to Erica, a world without flies would be full of faeces and dead bodies. Unlike, for example, butterflies and moths, whose caterpillars spend their time devouring our crops and plants, fly larvae tend to help rid the world of waste materials and then, as adults, perform essential work as pollinators. Yet they are rather unloved by humans who tend to regard them as pests at best and disease vectors at worst.
2019 is international Year of the Fly, and dipterists and entomologists around the world are working to raise the profile of the many thousands of species so far known to science.
Erica tells Jim about her work in the museum, cataloguing and identifying new species either sent in from other researchers or discovered by her and her colleagues on swashbuckling trips around the world. Modern gene sequencing techniques are revealing new chapters in the life histories of species, and her collection of 300 year old dead flies continues to expand our knowledge of how the world works.
Perhaps in the future, she argues, we will all be eating pasta and bread made from fly-larvae protein, or using small tea-bag like packets of maggots in our wounds to clean out gangrenous infection.
More shows like Discovery
View all
Global News Podcast
7,874 Listeners
More or Less
854 Listeners
Newshour
1,074 Listeners
In Our Time
5,565 Listeners
The Documentary Podcast
1,805 Listeners
6 Minute English
1,761 Listeners
Learning English Conversations
1,051 Listeners
Desert Island Discs
2,000 Listeners
The Naked Scientists Podcast
603 Listeners
Nature Podcast
753 Listeners
Health Check
93 Listeners
BBC Inside Science
406 Listeners
Science Weekly
429 Listeners
Science Magazine Podcast
821 Listeners
Curious Cases
767 Listeners
The Inquiry
746 Listeners
The Life Scientific
231 Listeners
Unexpected Elements
362 Listeners
CrowdScience
474 Listeners
People Fixing the World
241 Listeners
You're Dead to Me
3,222 Listeners
Americast
787 Listeners
The World, the Universe and Us
116 Listeners
The Bomb
1,016 Listeners