#long-legged fly

[miyrumiyru]

Leaf insects

[thesingingbullfrog]

Long-legged Fly: These lovely little predators are very beneficial in your garden. They eat many small little insects that might do damage to your plants. The males have little flags on their front feet that they wave at the females to get their attention. "Hey ladies!"

[patriciastrike]

Long-legged fly     Condylostylus longicornis

[inthecityofgoodabode]

May 2021: Rainy Day With Birds & Blossoms

It rained today so our plans to amend the soil at Plot 420 were put on hold.

“What has it got in its pocketses?”:

You’ll note despite putting down diatomaceous earth that some of these fruits have slug damage. Such is the reality of gardening, no method of prevention is 100% effective. Fortunately, we have many sharp knives to cut off slug bites with: 

Curbside find. Someone threw out this fencing: 

These U-posts were with the fencing so they must have been using them for tomato caging. The posts are a little bent but I possess the willpower & a hammer to set the world to right: 

A flock of unidentified migratory birds: 

Shot through the lattice: 

This chickadee & its mate have been working their asses off feeding their fledglings: 

[onenicebugperday]

found this beautiful little friend at my office in Maryland.. Never seen a species like this. Gorgeous colors and stilt-like legs

What a cute little babe! Looks like it’s from the family Dolichopodidae, the long-legged flies. There are lots of species so I don’t know which one specifically. Thanks for submitting this spindly little friend, though! As always, submissions don’t count towards the one (1) nice bug per day.

[alphynix]

Island Weirdness #43 — Flightless Flies

One of the most defining features of the true flies is a pair of wings, but various different lineages have actually become flightless.

Flightlessness is very rare in the long-legged fly family (Dolichopodidae), however, with only about 12 out of over 5000 species known to have lost functional wings — and eight of those are endemic to the Hawaiian islands.

The Koʻolau spurwing (Emperoptera mirabilis, sometimes classified as Campsicnemus mirabilis) was found only on Mount Tantalus in the southern Koʻolau Range of Oʻahu, close to Honolulu. About 2mm long (>0.1"), its wings were reduced to thin stiff spines, and it moved around by walking and hopping in leaf litter in the moist cool forest at elevations of about 300m (~1000ft).

Like most other long-legged flies it would have been predatory, hunting other tiny invertebrates.

The Koʻolau spurwing was actually still common on Tantalus as recently as the early 1900s, but multiple searches since the 1980s have failed to find any more of them at all. The species is most likely completely extinct, probably due to a combination of predation from invasive ants and habitat destruction from feral wild boar rooting up the forest floor.

Of the other flightless Hawaiian long-legged flies several other species are now possibly extinct — only one out of the five known Emperoptera species still definitely survives on the highest slopes of Mount Kaʻala, and one of the three Campsicnemus is either very rare or also extinct.

The Hawaiian islands also have three endemic species of flightless crane fly in the genus Dicranomyia, all of which are incredibly rare.

[usgsbiml]

Dolichopodid Fly, in hand sanitizer.  

Condylostylus near caudatus, Long-legged fly, Dolichopodid, Det provided by Flickr user Vox Sciurorum.   These common but small flies inevitably collapse into little puddles of legs and deformed bodies when collected, in Hand Sanitizer they can be floated and remain intact for photography.  Another of our early shots...no attempt to blacken the background the gray comes from reflections of the cuvette and flash.

[violetcatt]