Tiny fly blows bubbles to cool off: study

PARIS: Humans sweat, dogs pant, cats lick their fur. Animals have adopted an interesting array of techniques for regulating body temperature through evaporation.

But for ingenuity, the Latrine blowfly may very well take the cake. To cool down, it blows bubbles with its stomach juices through its mouth, and then sucks them back in, scientists revealed on Thursday.

"As the fluid moves out, evaporation occurs which lowers the fluid temperature, the fly then moves the cooled droplet in, which cools off the body temperature of the fly," explained Denis Andrade of the Sao Paulo State University in Brazil, who co-authored a study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

This "bubbling behaviour", he told AFP, appears to be "a very effective way for blowflies to promote evaporative cooling and, therefore, lower their body temperature." The Latrine blowfly is a warm-weather insect best known for depositing its eggs on dead animals.

The fly’s bubble-blowing has been observed before, but its function has remained a mystery up until now. Andrade and a team used infrared heat imaging cameras to look for any temperature changes on the fly’s body during "bubbling behaviour".

And they observed that the reddish coloured bubble -- growing to almost double its head size -- cooled rapidly, "down to as much as eight degrees Celsius below ambient temperature, within about 15 seconds," the researchers wrote.