Fly-blow

According to the Oxford English Dictionary Fly-blow is the egg deposited by a fly in the flesh of an animal, or the maggot proceeding therefrom. Rarely the action of depositing the egg. This morning I found this fly-blow on the fur of a newly dead mole. Alas poor Talpa! Each of the eggs is only about one millimetre in length. Soon they will hatch into maggots which will then consume the mole and eventually metamorphose into new flies. The mole will have spent his life (yes, I checked, he was a male) feasting on the invertebrate relatives of the fly. A highly complex thing, life!