Blowflies use drool to keep their cool
Dangle, slurp, repeat may help the insects protect their brains from overheating
UNUSUALLY COOL If this blowfly starts overheating, it has a drool, reswallow, repeat trick for reducing its temperature.
Muhammad Mahdi Karim
SAN FRANCISCO — Blowflies don’t sweat, but they have raised cooling by drooling to a high art.
In hot times, sturdy, big-eyed Chrysomya megacephala flies repeatedly release — and then retract — a droplet of saliva, Denis Andrade reported January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. This process isn’t sweating. Blowfly droplets put the cooling power of evaporation to use in a different way, said Andrade, who studies ecology and evolution at the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Rio Claro, Brazil.
As saliva hangs on a fly’s mouthparts, the droplet starts to lose some of its heat to the air around it. When the fly droplet has cooled a bit, the fly then slurps it back in, Andrade and colleagues found. Micro-CT scanning showed the retracted droplet in the fly’s throatlike passage near
