I’m seeing small flies in my home. What are they?
Repetitive outbreaks of small, humpbacked flies in a home, restaurant or hospital may mean serious trouble underground. Why underground? Because one of the common sources of phorid flies (also called humpbacked flies” or “coffin flies”) is a broken sewer line oozing goo under a building. Phorid fly adults are tiny, and most are brownish-yellow with brown wings, a small head, and a large, “humped” thorax. Adults are reluctant to fly and often run instead. Larvae are whitish and wormlike, and feed on sewage, dead animals, human corpses (underground and in mausoleums), animal feces, rotting plants, and have been found infesting open wounds in hospitals. When a sewer line breaks, perhaps from invading tree roots or settling ground, hundreds…even thousands…of pounds of organic materials can accumulate under a slab or crawl space. This subsoil area is rarely solid, as you would think; instead, settling soil and the fluid from the broken pipe produces open spaces. Once a population of fli
