As Dr Erica McAlister, our Senior Curator of Diptera, puts it in her book The Secret Life of Flies, 'if it weren't for these little organic munchers we would be knee-high in dead bodies'. In fact ...

Carrion flies locate dead animals through a keen sense of smell ... Beetles, like flies, are also holometabolous insects. Unlike flies, however, beetle larvae are called grubs.

So to avoid further sex, she may fall down dead—or more precisely, she may fake death, dropping from the air and lying motionless in the ground cover. At the University of Zurich, Khelifa ...