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they are very very stupid and very very determined. Seek Food. Dodge. Seek Food. Dodge. it's their whole life.
Exactly. The best explanation is that they are like very simple robots more than animals with complex thought. Just a few basic commands.
So like you said:
1) Seek food
a) If found, eat
b) If danger, flee
2) Return to step 1
And sometimes
c) Fuck
Not sometimes. Some of them skips step 1 entirely on their last stage of life, so that they can focus on c)
yeah, lots of insects don't even have the means to eat in their final form. Really puts a timer on reproduction.
Like cicadas!
Cicadas can still eat/drink in their big-stupid-flying-bug form. Their mouth parts are just really small and they are so driven to do the baby making thing that they don't really bother to eat or drink much. It is kinda like if a human had a mouth the size of a drinking straw, and was so jacked up on viagra and ozempic that they didn't care about eating food anyway.
Wow
You have a fantastic way with words.
What?! Then how do they pee on you so much?
I'm pretty sure they still drink saps
Wait, you let cicadas piss on you?
Brother, when you walk under a tree and wonder why it's drizzling even if the sky is clear, and you are under a tree... I have some news for you.
you let
I mean what are you gonna do? Yell "I don't consent!" at the trees when you go out?
I mean what are you gonna do? Yell "I don't consent!" at the trees when you go out?
Yes. With your mouth wide open and pointed upwards so they can hear you.
Oh yes! The victim. At what point does personal responsibility become a factor in this equation? I see piss comin' I run. She saw piss comin' she stayed. And why should I miss out on the next R. Kelly album just fo' that?
Riley
… or normal transpiration or guttation. But I'm not in a cicada zone.
What's the difference between a chickpea and a cicada?
Why you gotta kink shame?
I had a cicada drop dead from a tree right in front of me a few years ago. Scared the crap out me.
So then where does their energy come from? Their mother? Where does hers come from? Each generation is just expending energy without replenishing it?
They eat in their larval form and expend the energy from those nutrients in the adult form. Your body can break down tissue for energy (e.g. fat), my understanding is the same is also possible for insects, although the tissue is quite different.
So more like:
def fuck():
if mate:
fuck()
else:
seek_food()
if food:
check_danger()
if danger:
flee()
fuck()
eat()
fuck()
fuck()
No wonder I've been putting on weight.
The function of life
Your bug has a bug. Algorithm leads to starvation.
Same here tbh
TIL I am a fly.
Are you telling me, that Im basically a fly with more side quests?
Fruit flies appear in your house out of nowhere because you brought them in as fruit fly maggots on your fruit skins and they've been in the house the whole time.
Thanks! I hate it.
Love this band.
You telling me im eating maggots every time I eat an apple?
Brother do NOT look at any fruit under a microscope if you’re worried about this stuff
Hell nothin but a little extra protein to help me meet my macros
I'm a life long vegetarian and I just have to look at this situation as additional micronutrients.
Maggots, or eggs. It's best to not give these things too much thought, else you'll probably never eat again.
Every time you eat basically anything, you're eating some things you'd probably rather not think about. And the good news is you don't have to because your digestive system will harmlessly dissolve nearly all of those things.
Think of it as meat.
Free protein
Same as the face mites.
nopenopenope
That's one of the reasons you're supposed to wash your fruit!
Pretty sure eating a few fruit fly eggs isn't going to harm your health.
Pretty sure eating whatever toxic shit that crops get sprayed with might.
And why it’s a good idea to store fruit in the refrigerator. I’ve actually come to prefer cold bananas because of this habit.
Nah, who cares about fruit fly eggs? They're not harmful. You wash your fruit because they've gathered all kinds of bacteria between the farm and your house.
Have a fig.
Then go check how they're pollinated.
I started keeping more of my produce in the fridge and washing them with a drop of dish soap before preparing. There's so much dirt. It helps a ton with preventing them from colonizing my kitchen.
Like, I know they were all pulled from the dirt and whatever washing is done before selling it is done in bulk, so there's plenty missed - but there's so much dirt. I am SO CLOSE to being a germaphobe, it's barely irrational tbh. There's so much DIRT.
I used to be a near-germaphobe, then I became a school caretaker and then trained as a plumber. I was expecting more of a handyman kind of role at the school but quickly learned I had to deal with everything nobody else wants to do. When I got the job as a caretaker, I found out how much filth I had to deal with early on and nearly quit but I just stuck with it. Totally cured my fear of filth.
I certainly learned the incredible value of a nearby sink and soap.
d) poop
Also add their default state between all these actions of vigorously rubbing their hands(legs?) together in a scheming manner.
Meanwhile, the fly: Contemplating actio et reactio. "Woah, I can trigger this huge being just by touching it. Woah, so cool, let me do it again! Does it also work with other body parts? Woah, dude, yeah, crazy. I wonder if it's sentient, but can this mass of hydrocarbon even be? Do they also remember past lives as I do? Meh, we're just stardust in an endless cycle, let me touch it again!"
I wonder what stuff you have to do to be reincarnated as a HUMAN, gross to even think about! Derek, shall we go eat some cat shit?
truly delectable piss and shit :P
1) Seek food
a) If found, eat
b) If danger, flee
2) Return to step 1
You also need to add this line to your code to cover a fly's windows bug
3) Fly in X direction
a) If obstacle, repeat
Fly programmer after 3 min : “nothing but fucking net, I’m going on break”
More than that, their reflexes are hard-wired. Their sensory organs are pretty much directly connected to their legs, so they jump when they see movement without any involvement from their brain.
Yeah when it comes to insects, brain is a loose term. For many insects their 'brain' is kinda just their central nervous system spread over their body.
You can exploit this though. Aim above the fly, not where the fly currently is.
Since its hardwired they always respond the same so once you have figured out their responses its instant fly death.
Can confirm.
Have grabbed a fair number of annoying flies. (The older ones can even be caught mid flight)
Just above and forward of it. They launch diagonally.
I'd rather just pass the butter my whole life.
Oh my god.
Welcome to the club, pal.
tried to waft a fly out the massive gap of my open front door the other day. Nope, dumbass flew up to the top corner of my porch and promptly got wrapped up by a spider. Fucking idiots
Nature's little robots
Couldn't even finish this. Holy hell
The real cringe is in the comments.
Would you rather men be taught how to stay losers that can’t get laid? I mean i agree a lot of it is manipulative but lets not bullshit ourselves here…if it works then it works. Otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it. If you are a girl just know that most guys you’ve dated had to really struggle and work hard when it comes to dating. Meanwhile most girls have no problem getting dates. They can just get away with just looking pretty and having no personality. Guys on the other hand have to bring so much to the table. This is the reality, unfortunately.
I was about to comment about the exact same comment. "Would you rather men be taught how to stay losers that can’t get laid?" Like those are the only two paths, harassment or incels.
This exact concept is how a lot of people let themselves fall into weird delusions and extreme ideas. They boil things down into purely binary ideas. If it's not one extreme, it must be the opposite extreme.
How does the math here work out that most girls look pretty and have no personality and get dates and guys aren't getting dates? Who are the girls dating then?
Well okay "the other pretty girls" is an answer but obviously that's not what this kind of person means
The math is really a quite simple if/then statement.
if I = Lonely
then Women = Bad
Oh my god LOLOL
Haha cuz they're the food got it. Thanks to this next time I see a fly I'll probably smack it instead of just shooing it.
I watched the whole clip, and am so annoyed. We are taught to be nice and “ignore” this behavior though? Like??? Girls deserve to be taught to protect themselves, not placate men.
Sometimes playing nice and doing the awkward giggle is a way to protect yourself. Some people really don’t handle rejections well
It's a behaviour called 'fawning' that can sometimes be adaptive by actually protecting them from dangerous people at very little cost. It can be maladaptive, commonly in people with trauma, when it prevents them from being able to set healthy boundaries or express their needs to loved ones that are trustworthy. It's the lesser-known 3rd "F", along with Fight and Flight. Many social animals, especially dogs frequently do the same thing.
I learned it as the 4 "F"s - Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn
Man, imagine just doing the same thing every day your whole life. Ha ha, stupid flies! Glad we're nothing like them!
Considering how many flies there are, this strategy works great
They learned from patches o'hoolihan.
They are extremely persistent and well adapted with extraordinarily fast reflexes.
I feel personally attacked.
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Got a source to back that up?
Yeah:
Science
I’ll take your word for it, I’m no scienceologist
I’m not sure that’s gonna fly
Scientologist? Nah, that doesn't sound quite right. 😆
I think you mean scientician
Here is the word banana for scale: Banana.
Trust me, bro.
His source is that he made it the fuck up
I dunno man, that seems like a pretty rough estimate for the size of a fly's brain. Can you put this in reference to the brain of a newt?
Much smaller than a newt's brain.
That's what happens to newts that didn't get better
What's smaller than a teeny weeny fly?
A fly's teeny weeny.
Its a grower. Also its cold out.
What do you get when you pull the wings off of a fly?
A walk.
SUBSCRIBE.
I want more fly jokes.
I have one more but it's a lot to type out. I'll just copy and paste it.
Three swordsmen walk into a bar. The first one says,
‘I can use a sword better than all of you.’ The other two then say to him,
‘All right then. Prove it.’ So he says,
‘See that fly on the wall there?’ He swung his blade, cutting the fly clean in half. The second swordsman says,
‘That’s very good, but I can do you one better. See that fly on the wall there?’ He swung his blade twice, cutting the fly into four even quarters. The third swordsman nods.
‘That is very, very impressive, but I reckon that I can do better. See that fly on the wall there?’ He swings his blade once. The fly just buzzes away. The other two are unimpressed.
‘What’s the big deal? Look, it’s still buzzing around.’ The third swordsman smiles.
‘Yes, but that fly will never have children again.’
Ive never considered a fly's genitalia before today and behold, two fly dick jokes in one sitting. You, sir or madam, have been to some strange corners of the internet. I applaud that as a fellow adventurer.
We need a banana for scale.
They're roughly the size of a fly next to a banana
Big if true
Mostly because it's their only weapon.
Small, no weapons, no toxins, nothing to defend themselves. So instead of putting themselves in danger's way (which would need defense), they dodge it incredibly fast.
"But don't they see that swatter going at them for the 20th time?" they do! And their strategy works: they dodged that swatter successfully 20 times.
(Except that this mf won't survive the 21st atta- dang it)
Like humans. We don't have clearly visible weapons (nails are pretty bad at inflicting deep wounds without coming off, teeth also), but we have smart brains. Which allowed us to come up with nation-scale weapons instead. Or swatters careful approach there you are you little- OH COME ON.
Flies dodge in very predictable patterns, just aim for where its going
Flys jump slightly backward when they take off so swat slightly behind them when they’re landed.
Just clap about 3 inches above them. They get sucked in and killed 80% of the time. If you haven’t tried it you’ll be surprised how well it works.
But then I have fly guts all over my hands.
You likely typed this on your cellphone. The fly guts are cleaner.
This is like those people who say "A dog's mouth has less bacteria than a human's mouth!" I mean I've never looked up if that's true because I don't care, I still don't want a dog licking my mouth because now I have dog slobber on my lips.
I'm sure on a technical level there's a bigger variety of germs on my phone than on a dead fly (although they literally eat shit so who knows), but I don't want fly guts on my hands.
It’s that they land on shit, personally. It’s not like I’m wiping my ass with my phone, yanno?
It’s not like I’m wiping my ass with my phone, yanno?
Wait, am I the weirdo here???
Ever used your phone on the toilet?
Presumably, you put it down to grab the paper to wipe your arse; Did you wash your hands before you pulled your trousers up, picked up your phone, and put it into your pocket?
I too don't want fly guts on my hands, but I want rid of flies more than I'm repulsed by needing to wash fly guts from my hands.
… there are people out there who don’t clean their phone?
I'll have you know my phone is seasoned, like a cast iron skillet
instructions unclear. rubbed oil all over phone and put in oven at 450F for an hour, phone caught on fire.
No no, you're almost there, you gotta wait for the battery to 'rise'
You guys clean your phone?
I mean. There’s people out there that don’t clean themselves.
You're in for a brutal awakening
I didn't, and I doubt it. I tend to keep my electronics (and my home) clean. Regardless, even if it is "cleaner", it's disgusting.
As long as you're not at a fancy restaurant you're allowed to lick your fingers.
clapping your hands pushes the air out from between your hands. It doesn't suck in. But it does intercept the flight path of the fly
You have to lower your closed hands down first, then open them swiftly for an immense compression wave created by the low pressure region of air you have created which the fly cannot help but be sucked into, and then you clap.
This dude is out here force pulling flies like Obiwan
Now that i can see working
To add to this, move your hands into position slowly, flies don't seem to be able to see slow moving things - if you've ever seen a jumping spider sneak up on a fly, that's how they do it.
Slow > slow > slow > slow > Jump!
I don't want bits of fly stuck to my hands...
A spray bottle with soapy water knocks them out the air and kills them in seconds, it's way easier than using your hands, faster and safer than bug spray.
I just slowly position the swatter directly between my eyes/head and the fly. Slowly. Right above it. If I just take a regular swing I'm gonna miss most of the time.
Figured that out and it works
Better yet just grab a dish towel and swat it out of the air. You don't even have to connect, the wind will knock it down.
I prefer to spray them with Lysol, it seems to make them fly super slow, then I just suck them up in my vacuum!
Critters with exoskeletons use the pores to breathe. Coating them with cleansers goes a good way to suffocating them. I find a bottle with a focused spray useful for tagging them.
Yah, things like windex work fine too, though I don't think it is quite a good a surfactant as dish soap. Even a squirt of water slows them down enough that they drop to the ground where you can step on them (we used to have spray bottles of water around for the dogs).
That's a good one I'll have to remember that trick.
You guys are fucking stupid.
Just get chop sticks
Also most other animals haven't invented fly swatters yet. I guess horses use their tails. I'm sure there's a few other examples. But flus will not go extinct due to humans swatting at them therefore, as you stayed, they are mostly successful.
I think they do recognize the threat, it seems I only get a couple swats in before they leave the room
I wish it was the case where I live. Those flies are stubborn beyond reason. Or they're that confident in their skills and slowly drive me towards insanity while they feast on my skin for that ever-so-short second
also there are a lot of them
If a fly has 100 babies and all but 10 of them die before reaching adulthood, and then those 10 go pester you and you kill 8 of them, and only those last 2 go on to reproduce, it's still a success. Simple brain that relentlessly seeks food is a better strategy for them.
An electric net do the job, hovering them above and slowly come down. They will 80% fly straight up and get fried
Best way to kill flies: Once they've landed, carefully approach them until within arms' length. The next part takes commitment and you will want to wash your hands. Quickly clap your hands together at a point a few centimeters above them. They will 'dodge' into the clap. I'm about 90% successful with this method. Of course sometimes they won't land...
I'm just a stupid redditor that knows nothing, but I read/heard once that flies have a "take off" strategy that is not UP, like a helicopter, but at a 45 degree angle (or lower), like a plane. (But obviously from a resting position.) So any movement straight down on top of a sitting fly will likely not work. Unless you are using a swatter, which has different air resistance than your hand.
A clap works better in that it can mitigate the 45-degree takeoff from two directions.
Maybe, I'd say because it occurs right above them that 45 degrees in any direction equals splat. But maybe that's why I miss sometimes?
Version without washing your hands:
Just catch it at the same point where you would clap.
Now you have a fly in your hand that you can do whatever you want with.
Ooh I can feed it to the spider!
The ants!
The government doesn't want you to know this but the flies are free. I have 31,083 flies.
Hmm. Success rate? I feel like the timing would be tricky... I've actually started to cup my hands slightly and rarely need to wash them (but always do).
Success rate is probably like 9/10 for me, but I've been doing it all my life, so ymmv.
The moment you figure out the right height, it's hard to get wrong, really.
Spray bottle with isopropyl alcohol.
I do the same but I just catch them and throw them out the window
Houseflies are just a petty annoyance. I will just open a window and swat at them vaguely until they leave.
Horseflies, I will not suffer to live. They get the swat every time. And they seem to have much less efficient threat-detection than houseflies so they're a guaranteed one-swat, one-kill.
I've lived away from deerflies and horseflies for so long and I still remember how much it hurts to get bitten and the absolute bloodlust of hunting it down and beating it to death.
Insects do not have memory. It's like their brains are little organic computer programs that respond to stimuli in whatever way they have evolved to. You and I could reach for some food, get slapped on the hand by our angry grandma and told to wait, and then learn "I should wait and not do that again so I don't get smacked."
A fly can't do that. It detects possible food and goes to investigate. When you attack it, the fly detects a possible threat and moves. Then when the movement reflex is over, it detects possible food and goes to investigate... Just like all of the flies that came before it that successfully passed on the genes that gave them reflexes to investigate food and avoid threats.
Scientists recently mapped in detail a fruit fly's brain with 140,000 neurons.
The human brain has more than 86 billion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain
That is about 500,000 times more neurons, and I don't even know how many orders of magnitude more synaptic connections.
The complexity of mammal brains compared to insect brains is astronomical. Flies just don't have the memory to store concepts like "this is a sentient creature that wants to kill me so I should go somewhere else." Flies spend their entire existences seeking food and places to breed around other organic creatures, they just dodge and come back, dodge, come back. Most of the time it works because their brains are very good at dodging and avoidance in 3D space.
something that i wonder about is why mammal brains in animals don't seem to learn better? like a squirrel crossing a street, it likely knows cars should be avoided due to size, and i would guess it knows cars are usually found on streets. but it doesn't seem to ever learn to look, or to proceed across in the direction it's going as fast as possible. i saw one do 3 or 4 direction changes in the middle of the street the other day as i was driving and i damn near swerved to avoid the stupid thing. it just doesn't seem like a complex problem to me. it seems like such a clear, simple and repetitive situation.
why mammal brains in animals don't seem to learn better?
Lots of large mammals have been seen more and more to develop tool uses, from the other apes to whales to elephants. Dolphins and especially Orcas are extremely intelligent and work in teams to hunt. Why exactly they don't seem as intelligent as we are is a complex question that is debated, even our measures of intelligence are thought to be inadequate to understand the animals.
like a squirrel crossing a street, it likely knows cars should be avoided due to size, and i would guess it knows cars are usually found on streets. but it doesn't seem to ever learn to look, or to proceed across in the direction it's going as fast as possible
So squirrels are much smaller and have shorter lifespans. They also have a much less capable form of communication. We know that one of the reasons we were able to dominate the planet is our communication. We can teach our children abstract concepts before they ever encounter them. A squirrel doesn't actually know what a road is. It's just smooth stone to them. A car is so large and fast usually they don't have enough time to process what it's doing, much less be able to warn their fellow squirrels about the dangers of roads. How would they even know that cars only go on the roads? They walk on grass, soil, and climb trees, why should other objects be limited to the "road?"
or to proceed across in the direction it's going as fast as possible
Again, why would the squirrel have an inherent understanding of road-crossing? Their natural predators are frequently coming from the sky or ambushing from the brush, not careening down a smooth stone surface that they don't understand is a long, winding pathway for humans.
We have built tools and infrastructure so specially to suit us that our basic homes pose extra danger to our children that we need to guard them against and teach them about. Simple activities like sitting on furniture and getting off furniture can result in falling on the head or even injuring the neck of small children. Electrical outlets and cables pose risks. Stairs are a major danger until children grow big and strong enough to safely climb and descend them. Cars? A squirrel has no concept if a car. It must hide from furry and feathery predators, forage for food, and reproduce.
Maybe some squirrels are slowly taking observance of the dangers of roads and may one day that trait for the new danger will evolve to add to their instincts, but that does not seem like a given, based on what we know.
We actually statistically modeled Whale communications and found that they have the same frequency as any other language on the planet with certain "words" and "phrases" being used far more commonly and others much rarer.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11797547/
https://cosmiclog.com/2025/02/06/scientists-find-links-between-whale-songs-and-languages/
A squirrel doesn't actually know what a road is. It's just smooth stone to them. A car is so large and fast usually they don't have enough time to process what it's doing, much less be able to warn their fellow squirrels about the dangers of roads. How would they even know that cars only go on the roads? They walk on grass, soil, and climb trees, why should other objects be limited to the "road?"
Meanwhile a crow will wait for the light to turn red. It places a walnut in the travel lane of the road where the car wheels will be. The crow hops a few feet over the white line out of the travel lane and waits for the car to turn green. After the walnut is cracked it once again waits for the red light to safely pick up its meal.
Crows are about the same size as a squirrel yet are vastly smarter.
You probably wouldnt react any better if something the size of a building was flying at Mach 1 at you.
I think animals are confused by cars because they think that something large and fast is either a predator chasing them, or it's not dangerous. When a squirrel sees a car coming towards it, it triggers its prey instincts to run, but it can't understand that the car is not chasing it and only moves in a straight line. So a squirrel sees a car coming towards it and tries to flee to the nearest point of safety, based on the car's speed and proximity if it were giving chase.
This is the same reason I think that deer often jump into the path of cars; they just see the fast-approching threat and try to flee, often forwards in the same direction they're facing. It's just trying to flee blindly and has no conception that it would be safer if it stopped and leapt the opposite way, or just stood still by the side of the road.
They react to the car like it is a chasing predator that is not confined to the road, and make decisions about where to run based on that.
In evolutionary terms, the human-created threats that mammals face today basically appeared instantaneously. There hasn't been time for natural selection to push for greater vehicle or firearm avoidance, etc.--though I don't think we can say that there's been *no* change, given the short life cycles of a lot of smaller animals.
We humans have the same issues; a lot of ours come down to that we're a species that spent 150,000 years in a sparsely populated, tribal, hunter-gathering world that practically overnight invented agriculture, money, cities, computers, guns, nukes, etc. A response that might have kept your family safe in the Paleolithic could start a total war today.
The only reason why children don’t play in the streets and do the exact same thing a squirrel would do is because an adult taught them not to. And an older adult taught that that adult when they were young. Animals aren’t able to pass down complex information generation to generation like people are. Imagine how lost we would be if no information was passed down from prior generations. There wouldn’t even be cars.
Okay but when I read an article saying butterflies retain memories after going through metamorphosis from when they were caterpillar - what the heck are they talking about?
I guess it depends how you define a memory. They trained the caterpillar with shocks and smells to avoid one particular branch of a y shaped tube and the mature moth remembered which tube to avoid. It's something to do with a particular type of odour memory neuron called mushroom bodies.
That's above my paygrade. Maybe I was too generalized with my comment, or maybe butterflies specifically have a certain amount of memory - butterflies are much larger than fruit flies, after all.
But that'a a reasonable question and I'm afraid ai cannot confidently answer it.
Insects do not have memory.
They absolutely do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect_cognition
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20211126-why-insects-are-more-sensitive-than-they-seem
Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks, offensive!
i cant believe i'm hearing this non-sense...
Would you like to know more?
Would you like to know more?
It's more accurate to say they lack cognition and understanding of the world that would allow them to understand what is happening.
They have memory, but it's simple based on what information they can get from their senses.
So they can remember "food there" and "danger hot there" but it's based on smells and heat and stuff like that.
But mostly, humans are very bad at killing flies, so they aren't worried about us. Because their brains are smaller, and the neurons much shorter length, they experience reality "faster" than humans. So they are always ahead of us.
Bees, sure. But mosquitoes? House flies? Fruit flies? I’m pressing X on those idiots.
The person you are replying to linked evidence of fruit fly learning and cognition. They are one of the most widely studied model organisms.
For those still doubting evolution because it's a theory. Evolution is observed in Drosophila, they can adapt to different environments in a matter of weeks because of their rapid reproduction.
The Making of Long-Lasting Memories: A Fruit Fly Perspective
You’d be shocked to discover what organisms have memory.
Mosquitos have been observed remembering the people who swat at them and avoiding that individual for others.
When you look into it almost every living thing is either smarter or more interesting than you once thought.
To put it in perspective, if a Human brain is an iPhone, a Fly brain is the little electronic sensor that detects your hand under the soap dispenser in a public restroom. Their little brains can do the same basic sorts of functions our brains do, but on a much smaller scale, and usually in a much simpler way.
If you are bored and have a few minutes to spare, go search up the 'Drosophilia Flight Simulator'. Some science hippies built a system to glue a fly to some senors and then trick it into thinking it was actually flying by moving a screen with some simple shapes on it around in response to the forces the sensors detected...and the flies seemed perfectly happy to move around this way like they were actually flying. The video of this thing in operation is worth the couple minutes of time to watch!
They’re attracted to co2, and we’re constantly expelling that. I saw some kind of trap with this in mind but forgot what it was called
yeast and sugar water trap.
And fuck up this wine I'm fermenting? No thanks!
I've noticed that flies will annoyingly bash against windows and circle rooms for hours. However once hit with a blast of raid will often instantly exit through a door or window. So they know how to get out, they just choose not to.
They don't even know the swatter thing is a part of the thing they landed on.
A fly's short term memory only lasts around 4 seconds, so if you swat them they already forgotten that you did the next time they land on you.
As to why they land on you yes, the sense there's food, could be a salty liquid (sweat, I'm talking about sweat you guys). It's their instincts that make them go where the food is.
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They are attracted to the CO2 we give off. They don’t perceive humans as a threat and they taste with their feet, so they are going to stick with their mission despite your swatting. They want to eat what is on our skin - oils, dead skin cells, all that good stuff left from sweat. When they are biting it’s females going for blood, literally. They need the iron and protein for egg making/laying.
They are basically little drones that respond to specific stimuli, mainly the concentration of specific chemicals in the air. Mosquitoes, for example, always try to fly to areas of increased carbon dioxide, this means they naturally fly to living animals they can suck blood out of. Once they have had their blood meal, they stop being obsessed with co2 which lets them go lay their eggs.
A lot of flies are attracted to chemicals produced by decay, including stale sweat.
ELI5 why do humans constantly swat at you, when they are constantly missing?
You can say the same thing about humans. Why do men keep trying to get with a girl who turns them down? Why do some people vote against their own interests over and over? Why do kids want to do the exact thing you told them not to do? Creatures are stubborn and sometimes dumb.
It's disappointing, and terrifying how we have humans this dumb, let alone so many of them.
You can say the same thing about humans. Why do men keep trying to get with a girl who turns them down?
So you’re saying, like a fly, they just land on them?
Or are you saying flies are trying to get my phone number?
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