Flies with Dr Erica McAlister

BBC Gardeners' World Magazine

Published: Thursday, 25 August 2022 at 9:00 am

Flies are the unsung heroes of our planet – pollinating, recycling, controlling pests and more. Discover why flies are so vital, in our podcast with Dr Erica McAlister and Kate Bradbury

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The world of flies is so amazing and varied. In our gardens alone, there are pollinating flies, flies that eat aphids and others that live in our compost bins and recycle plant material and other organic matter. But did you know that flies are also incredibly important to garden ecosystems and provide food for an enormous range of species further up the food chain? Flies really are the unsung heroes of the planet.

Hello, I’m Kate Bradbury, and today I’m talking to Dr Erica McAlister, Senior Curator of Diptera at the Natural History Museum. She’s the author of two fascinating books on flies, which open up the world to these good looking, feisty and downright amazing creatures. You may have heard her on the radio chatting about the wonderful world of flies, but if you haven’t you’re in for a treat. I met here at the Knepp rewilding site in West Sussex, where storks and beavers rub shoulders with wild-range longhorn cattle and Tamworth pigs. She was there collecting flies, obviously. So I started by asking her, what is a fly?

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