I learned recently about bee lice, who despite their name and appearance are actually a type of wingless fly (!) who cling to and kleptoparasitize honeybees and THEY ARE SO SHAPED 😭
(image credit: NSW DPI, Albertus Horn, Miles Zhang)
Their morphology is so obviously highly specialized that their taxonomic position has been a matter of uncertainty basically since they were first discovered; it's only from molecular phylogenetic studies in the past decade that they've been uncovered as being nested within the family Drosophilidae, nearby relatives of laboratory icon Drosophila melanogaster! Other cool research I saw about them was this one study looking into the anatomy of their claws and how they attach to bees— if I'm interpreting this paper right they can apparently cling to a bee with a force over 1000 times their own body weight 🥺 (sources: 1, 2)
HEE HEE HEE HEE ↑
