Erica McAlister

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr Erica McAlister, of London's Natural History Museum, talks to Jim Al-Khalili about the beautiful world of flies and the 2.5 million specimens for which she is jointly responsible. According to Erica, a world without flies would be full of faeces and dead bodies. Unlike, for example, butterflies and moths, whose caterpillars spend their time devouring our crops and plants, fly larvae tend to help rid the world of waste materials and then, as adults, perform essential work as pollinators. Yet they are rather unloved by humans who tend to regard them as pests at best and disease vectors at worst. 2019 is international Year of the Fly, and dipterists and entomologists around the world are working to raise the profile of the many thousands of species so far known to science. Erica tells Jim about her work in the museum, cataloguing and identifying new species either sent in from other researchers or discovered by her and her colleagues on swashbuckling trips around the world. Modern gene sequencing techniques are revealing new chapters in the life histories of species, and her collection of 300 year old dead flies continues to expand our knowledge of how the world works. Perhaps in the future, she argues, we will all be eating pasta and bread made from fly-larvae protein, or using small tea-bag like packets of maggots in our wounds to clean out gangrenous infection.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
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0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
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0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	This is Discovery from the BBC. I'm Jim El Killelli and in today's program I'm in conversation with a leading scientist about their life and research. Welcome to the life scientific.
0:52.0	Did you know that there are more species of Welcome to the Life Scientific.
0:53.0	Did you know that there are more species of flies in the UK, the current
0:57.2	counters over 7,000, than there are species of mammals in the entire world? And did you know that 2019 is International Year of
1:05.8	the Fly? Well you do now. My guest today is the entomologist Erica McAllister, senior curator
1:12.4	of Diptura or flies flies, and Ciphanaptura, fleas at the Natural
1:17.1	History Museum in London, where she's jointly responsible for 2.5 million flies and 260,000 fleas.
1:25.0	She says, think about the diversity of mammals.
1:28.0	Would it be right to say that we must eradicate all mammals because one or two species are a nuisance? So why would we wish to get rid of flies?
1:35.8	She sees herself as an ambassador for flies, explaining their vital role as pollinators.
1:41.0	She adds, how can you dislike a species that from start to finish is maintaining and enhancing the environment?
1:47.0	Erika is not just to be found in the huge vaults below South Kensington,
1:51.0	with a vast array of field experience to her name, she can also be found
	...

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