Oriental fruit fly
The oriental fruit fly is a small fly with yellow and black stripes and a dark T shape on its tail end. It loves ripe fruit, and that makes farmers worried. The mother lays her eggs right inside fruit, and the babies eat the fruit from the inside.
How big is it?
How long is it?
How big is Oriental fruit fly compared to YOU?
Just maths in your browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
One mother fly can lay more than a thousand eggs in her life.
She pokes a tiny hole in the fruit skin and hides her eggs underneath.
The babies are creamy white maggots about one centimetre long, and they crawl out of the fruit to dig into the soil.
In summer it takes only about 16 days to grow from an egg into a fly.
Some orchids in Southeast Asia make a smell that pulls in the male flies, and the flies carry their pollen.
Most asked questions about Oriental fruit fly
?Is the oriental fruit fly dangerous?
Not to people. It cannot bite or sting, but it can spoil a lot of fruit.
?What does the oriental fruit fly eat?
Its maggots eat the inside of ripe fruit. Many kinds of fruit, wild and grown on farms, can be hit.
?How big is the oriental fruit fly?
It is small, about 8 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Bactrocera dorsalis
- Group
- Flies and mosquitoes
- Family
- Tephritidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Diptera > Tephritidae
- Lives on
- Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Bactrocera dorsalis (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 unknown author. Public domain, 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 hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
Housefly
New World screwworm fly
Lovebug
Tsetse fly
Common fruit fly
Asian tiger mosquito
Blue orchard bee
Migratory locust
Armoured ground cricket
Brown centipede
Giant peacock moth
Texas brown tarantula