Apple maggot fly
The apple maggot fly is a small shiny black fly with white stripes and bright green eyes. Its wings have dark zigzag bands. It lays its eggs inside apples, and its little white maggots grow up inside the fruit.
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Fun facts
The dark bands on its wings look like the legs of a jumping spider. That trick scares off hungry animals.
Long ago these flies only lived on hawthorn berries. About 150 years ago some of them switched to apples.
The maggot is pale and hard to see, but if it eats green apple flesh, the green shows through its skin.
It spends the winter as a pupa in the soil and comes out as a fly in summer, mostly in August.
The female has four white bands across her shiny black tail end.
Most asked questions about Apple maggot fly
?Is the apple maggot fly harmful?
Not to people. But its maggots spoil apples, which makes them rot and drop early.
?How big is the apple maggot fly?
About 4 to 6 millimetres long, a bit smaller than a housefly.
?Is the worm in my apple an apple maggot?
Maybe. Apple maggots eat the flesh of the apple, while many caterpillars eat the core.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Rhagoletis pomonella
- Group
- Flies and mosquitoes
- Family
- Tephritidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Diptera > Tephritidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Apple maggot, Railroad worm
Where the facts come from
- Apple maggot (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Joseph Berger, Bugwood.org. CC BY 3.0 us, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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