Psycho Drain Flies

My wife, Chloë, and I were at home, sipping wine after a long day of teaching.

“A weird thing happened today when I was taking a leak,” I told her.

Her eyebrows fluttered up and she set down her glass.

“I was up in the men’s room at school, taking a piss, and these little worms came out.”

She gasped in horror. “Out of you?”

“No, no. Out of the urinal drain. They bubbled up with the foam, then got washed down again with the flush.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Chloë said, relaxing in her chair. “But wow, I wonder what they are.”

Over the coming weeks, I saw more of these dark, wormy critters—about as thick as pencil lead and a quarter of an inch in length—wriggling in the golden foam. Closer inspection confirmed that they were, indeed, emerging from the urinal drain. It’s easy to get grossed out by this sort of encounter—like maggots in a rotting mouse or ants covering the cat’s dish—but my response was more of admiration and an eager determination to know more about these creatures. How in the hell can they survive in the dingy pipes of a public restroom? And what might we learn from them in this era of environmental crisis?

Psychoda, Psycho, Psyche

A quick YouTube search revealed a suspect known as the drain fly. With this clue, I phoned my friend, Rick Hafele, an entomologist specializing in aquatic invertebrates. “Oh yeah, that sounds like drain fly larva,” Rick said. “Family Psychodidae. They’re harmless.”

Relieved that our university bathrooms weren’t breeding malarial mosquitoes or flesh-eating sand flies, I listened to Rick’s description of the Psychodidae family of insects, commonly known as drain flies, sewer gnats, or moth flies. The larvae develop in plumbing traps, sinks, and basins, feasting on bacteria, fungi, algae and decaying organic matter.

After about two weeks, depending on the species, the wrigglers enter a pupal stage (the pupa looks like a tiny grain of brown rice) which lasts from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. When metamorphosis is complete, the mature insect will crack open the casing and emerge, spreading its wings and flying from its septic nursery. The broad, fuzzy wings of the aerial adult express the “moth fly” moniker and reveal the origin of the insect’s family name: in Greek, “psycho” refers to the butterfly, as well as the goddess Psyche, who personified the human soul, or “the psyche.”

The Greek myth of Psyche comes to us mainly through the second century novel Metamorphoses by Roman author Lucius Apuleius (not to be confused with Ovid’s classic by the same title). The story of Psyche (Anima)—a beautiful young woman who suffered many trials under Eros (Cupid) and his jealous mother Aphrodite (Venus) before she was granted immortality by Zeus (Jupiter)—parallels the life cycle of the butterfly. Butterflies must endure hardships and degradation, which include a lowly worm phase, cocoon captivity, self-digestion, and complete reformation before their unfurled glory.

Pioneering psychologists in the early twentieth century drew parallels between Psyche’s journey and the way humans find happiness. As a mortal, she struggles and makes mistakes, but by using her mind to adapt and drawing on her resources, including ample help from others, Psyche achieves fulfillment. This painful but necessary passage, often interpreted as the move from innocent unconsciousness to enlightened consciousness, evokes Hegel’s statement, “It is thinking that causes the wound and heals it too.” Psyche’s depiction as the winged goddess of the mind and soul—that which is alive in us—and her intimate association with the butterfly reinforce ideas about human development, spiritual metamorphosis and, in the case of immortality, the soul’s departure from the body.

The connections between the figure Psyche, the human mind, and the butterfly—beauty, complexity, fragility and transformation—inform centuries of myth, art, poetry and even sciences like psychology. Some mental health practitioners, for example, continue to use the butterfly’s metamorphosis as an inspiring symbol of hope and change.

It made me think: Could this critter living in a world of pee and grime also be inspiring?

From the Urinal to the Lab

Rick urged me to collect a specimen that we could examine under the microscope. “Drop it in some alcohol,” he advised, so I brought in a couple mini-bar sized bottles of vodka. Pocketing a bottle along with tweezers from the English department’s first aid kit, I walked nonchalantly to the bathroom. Friday afternoons are usually quiet in Bellamy Hall. I placed the vodka and tweezers on the porcelain mantle of the urinal before seeing my colleague, Ryan Topper, walk in. 

Ryan eyed the vodka bottle. “Rough week?” he asked.

We both laughed and I explained my mission.

Ryan had also seen “the worms” and was interested in my fieldwork. The university has been on a tight budget since COVID, and we’ve noticed the absence of those minty pucks in the urinal drains and the decrease of janitorial services. The bathroom looked and smelled fine, but the easing of sterility may have been just what these drain flies needed to make a life for themselves— just as a deserted house overgrown with weeds is a better habitat for mice, birds and insects, or as an abandoned dock thick with barnacles and sea lettuce attracts crustaceans and fish.

Midway through a truly quiet Saturday morning in my office, grading papers and drinking tea, I ventured again to the men’s room with booze and tweezers. Moments into a good whizz, the creatures emerged, surfing high on the bubbling yellow crest, inches from the drain, vulnerable to my attack. But when I reached down with the tweezers, the auto flush washed them back into the slimy safety of their home.  

Taping an index card over the flush sensor, I returned in a couple hours after more grading and cups of tea. Again, I peed; again, the twisting larvae danced out. I pounced. So small and delicate, the gentlest tweeze crushed the body of the first hapless catch. I bent another like a kinked hose. Using my finger tip, I finally raised a perfect specimen to the bottle’s mouth and capped it. A shake, and it descended, writhing through the column of vodka.

This is science, I told myself.

And of course, I washed my hands.

Rick Hafele placed the specimen under his microscope. The five-millimeter, light-brown larvae had stiffened into a hook, its head—onyx eyes and a bristly mouth—tucked into a point. It’s segmented body, like plates on a centipede, sprouted hairs that appeared blond under the scope’s illumination. The final posterior segment was longer and coned, ending in what I deemed “a hairy butt.”

“Well,” Rick nodded. “Counting anal hairs can be an important way of identifying species.”

He also explained that a spiracle, or breathing siphon, in the butt drew oxygen from the atmosphere. Like mosquito larvae, these creatures do not have gills, and must reach the surface to breath. The narrow, shadowed aperture of the urinal drain never afforded me a view of the respirating juveniles, but they must have been there. I looked again at the sleepy black eye set in its lighter almond orbit. Although these eyes function only as simple light sensors, I had to wonder what they beheld in the strange world above.

The Life of a Drain Fly

Later I went back to the school bathroom with a small jar of pond water and a Q-tip, and collected four living larval specimens, which I carried home and transferred to a sixteen-ounce, well-washed salsa container. Remembering these psychoda take air from above, I added only a half-inch of the algae-tinted water and some bacterial muck scraped from our garden fountain.

“How are your psycho piss flies doing?” Chloë asked when I brought them home. 

I laughed and told her I liked the name “psycho.” It invokes those associations with the Greek goddess Psyche, the butterfly, the mind and soul. The meaning of “psycho” as “crazy”—popularized by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 horror film Psycho—comes from the clinical term “psychosis,” which describes a serious mental illness characterized by delusions, hallucinations, and other dangerous disconnections from reality.  

“But really,” Chloë smiled. “This is a little crazy.”

“Crazy that I’m raising drain flies or crazy how they survive?”

“Both,” she said.

I agreed. How do these tiny animals survive inundations of urine with its scalp scorching urea (the main ingredient in hair removal products like Neet) as well as the deadly cleansing potential of ammonia?

“It’s an insect that’s adapted to a harsh environment,” explained Jennifer Gillett-Kaufman, an entomologist at Texas A & M University. During a Zoom interview, she described other insects, such as midges, black flies, and rattail maggots, that flourish in polluted water. Rattail maggots of the drone fly species are especially fond of dairy farm poop pools. In the case of public bathrooms, Professor Gillett-Kaufman reminded me that “frequent flushing would dilute the urine’s toxicity,” and that the urine would, in fact, “provide nutrients for the biofilm” on which the larvae feed, making that yucky sump a life-sustaining bath and broth.

Our wastes suit their tastes.   

Naturalists, poets, and fly anglers have long extolled the life cycle of mayflies and damselflies inhabiting our pristine rivers and lakes. But the psychoda is unique: its amazing life goes on in a dreary lavatory with its blistered Formica counters and cracked concrete floors, its sealed opaque window admitting speckled gray light, but no fresh air. How did the first pioneer drain flies arrive? How many generations have developed here? I think of the flannel gray adults, which live about two weeks, hopping and flying through the quiet night, their long, feathery antennae quivering for a sign, a mate.

“The female, who’s a bit larger, emits a pheromone,” Professor Gillett-Kaufman told me, rolling her hands out like a dancer, “which the male senses with his big, fluffy antennae.” They couple so excitedly that scales frisk off their high, tented wings. The females return like swallows to the natal nook from which they emerged, laying up to one hundred eggs. The adults vanish largely unnoticed, washed away or ground into the cold floor. Some made it to the warm, dusty plateau above the lights, where I espied them in desiccated quietus.

Should I share this discovery with anyone? Although these flies do not transmit any pathogens, might an embarrassed janitorial supervisor order a stern bleach scrubbing that would extinguish their lives forever?

A Parable of Survival

I opened the lid, and with a flashlight and magnifying glass, Chloë and I gazed into their steeped green world. “Still kicking,” I nudged one with a pencil point. “I hope they pupate soon.”

“And what will you do if they hatch?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Be inspired?”

The butterfly and Psyche corollary are inspiring. Chloë, an ardent gatherer and gardener, reminded me of delicious chanterelle mushrooms we harvest from the decaying forest floor, and the lotus, which rises out of the fetid swamp to bloom clean, bright and fragrant. The lotus is a powerful Buddhist and Hindu symbol of spiritual purification, transcendence, and renewal.

Could the story of the psycho piss fly raise a new parable of survival and hope in this depressing age of environmental degradation? “Do not despair,” we’ll counsel our anxious grandchildren, “for the fairest of souls may rise from the foulest of places.”

But a little despair might not be a bad thing. In the absence of despair, apathy festers. Some Evangelical Christians, for example, interpret The Book of Revelation as an assurance that if the world is ending soon, there is no need to worry about pollution and climate change because The Bible promises that everything will be okay. These eschatological convictions, more widespread than I imagined, lead to apathy about our imperiled planet.

The goddess Psyche despaired at moments during her trials, but she never surrendered. Her story reminds us that adaptation is inevitable and beautiful. We need these narratives of renewal—not to replace concern and despair, but to invigorate our commitment to environmental stewardship.

Every day I peeked into the container, hoping for emergence. The mossy water tingled with minute copepods and midges. Condensation droplets formed along the transparent walls. For two weeks life hummed along, and then grew still. And one night, I flipped on the light and beheld a tiny, dark round fly clinging to the side. Then another. I called Chloë, and we celebrated with glasses of Prosecco.

A macro view through my camera revealed the sparkling heart-shaped wings and lacy, black and white striped antennae. Born in a bathroom, pissed on, flushed, threatened with chemicals and brushes, they endured, metamorphosed, and emerged as “imago.” Imago, or the last stage of an insect’s life, also expresses the maturity of our imaginings, a vision of life fully realized, the end that launches beginnings.

Scientific language with its specific nomenclature and technical complexity can alienate some lay readers. But terms like psychoda and imago reveal a language richly allusive and poetic. A language that deepens our appreciation for creatures like the drain fly—or as we might more properly call them, psycho piss flies.

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Featured Image: A drain fly viewed through a camera’s macro lens. Photo by author, 2024.

Henry Hughes is an Oregon Book Award-winning poet and the author of Back Seat with Fish: A Man’s Adventures in Angling and Romance.  He is a regular reviewer for Harvard Review and the editor of the Everyman’s Library anthologies: The Art of Angling, Fishing Stories, River Poems, and River Stories. He teaches literature and writing at Western Oregon University and directs Write Place: Literature, Arts & the Environment. Website. Contact.