Dipterology (FLIES) with Dr. Bryan Lessard
Image description: Dr. Bryan Lessard aka Bry the Fly Guy wears dark-rimmed glasses and a dark chambray shirt and looks toward camera with a soft smile. He is standing in a collections room and holds up a tray of preserved specimens.
DO NOT YOU SKIP THIS ONE. Listen. Give flies a chance. Everyone loves a bee, but meanwhile flies are out here with all kinds of bodies and adaptations, inhabiting the least inhabitable lands, pollinating your future lunch, shimmering in rainbows, having lifelong love affairs, and burrowing in your back to eat your flesh. It’s a wild world and Australian Dipterologist Dr. Bryan Lessard creaks open a door to a wonderland of fly facts. Open a spot in your heart for shiny metallic ones, soft velvety goths, tiny humpbacks named after bodybuilders, and flies that give their lives to further medical research. Oh also: how to kill the ones in your kitchen — if you choose to. But after this, you might open a window and gently suggest their exit first.
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Dr. Lessard’s website
Follow Dr. Bryan Lessard on Twitter & Instagram
A donation was made to WWF
More links you may enjoy:
Where Dr. Lessard is doing his post-doc
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RuPaul on Graham Norton (fun clip at 5:14)
Is this a romance we’re having is that what it is?
Wingless soldier fly: Boreoides subulatus
RuPaul Now Has a Species Named After Him, Thanks to Gay Scientist
Who’s Watching RuPaul’s Drag Race Now?
What it’s like to have a botfly then take stunning photos of it
A systematic review of human pathogens carried by the housefly (Musca domestica L.)
Musca domestica acts as transport vector hosts
I’ll recognize the shit out of “culicidology”
NHM’s Dr. Brian Brown has discovered 500 new species of fly
Dr. Brian Brown’s tiniest fly named after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arms
Me interviewing Dr. Brian Brown at the NHM’s First Fridays
Good macro lenses for insect photography here and here and here
iNaturalist Community Science site
Phil Torres The Jungle Diaries – subscribe to get his botfly update!
More episodes you might like:
Aperiology (MACRO PHOTOGRAPHY)
Forest Entomology (CREEPY CRAWLIES)
Carnivorous Phytobiology (MEAT-EATING PLANTS)
Planariology (VERY COOL WORMS I PROMISE)
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Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media
Transcripts by Emily White of The Wordary
Website by Kelly R. Dwyer
Theme song by Nick Thorburn