How do flies breathe?

Insects like flies have a very different respiratory system than we do. Learn more about how flies and insects breathe in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where
smart happens. Hi, I'm brain with today's question, how do
flies and other insects for that matter, breathe? Insects breathe

(00:21):
in a way that's very different from us. Instead of
having a central place to gather oxygen like human lungs
and a transport system like our heart and blood to
deliver the oxygen to all of the cells of the body,
insects have a system of fine branching tubes called a
tracheal system that's spread all over their bodies. Imagine that

(00:43):
you are an oxygen molecule in the atmosphere and you're
about to be breathed by an insect. You enter a
tiny hole on the insects thorax or abdomen, called a spirical.
The spircle is the opening of a long tube called
a trachea. You proceed down this tube, which is long,
air filled and branching. You continue to move through the

(01:07):
branches until you reach a tiny fluid filled dead end
called a tracheole. You dissolve into the fluid, and from
the fluid you diffuse or move across the wall of
the tracheol into an insects cell such as a muscle cell.
The movement of air through the tracheal system of most
insects relies solely on diffusion. Because most insects rely on diffusion,

(01:32):
which occurs best over small distances, they cannot get very large.
You'll not see huge ants as biggest buildings like in
the movie Them, because enough air could not diffuse that
far into their bodies to keep their cells alive. However,
some larger insects can use their abdominal muscles to force

(01:52):
air in and out of the tracheal system in a
limited way. So with this system in mind, it would
be difficult to stray angle a bug. However, if the
tracheal system fills with water, it takes much longer for
air to diffuse through the system. Therefore, an insect can
drown fairly easily for more illness and thousands of other topics.

(02:15):
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