This was not a beautiful baby

Images of undisturbed subjects in their natural environment. All subject types.

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MarkSturtevant
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This was not a beautiful baby

Post by MarkSturtevant »

I was keeping a bucket of foul water in the back yard, and occasionally harvesting mosquito larvae from it to attempt to photograph them. That effort ultimately pretty much failed (next summer though ... 🤨 ). But the bucket also turned up a visitor, which was this large bee-mimicking Syrphid fly (it looks like Mallota posticata). This was interesting since the bucket also had a few very young rat-tailed maggots.
ImageBig Syrphid fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

I should explain.

Syrphid flies of course are these various flies in one family (Syrphidae), and they are well known to be mimics of bees and wasps. They are commonly called “sweat bees”, and some are called “drone flies” if they are mimicking a bee like this one was. Syrphid larvae, on the other hand, come in a wide range of forms and are found in diverse habitats. The one people probably know best are the larvae that crawl among plants and feed on aphids (https://biocontrol.entomology.cornell.e ... rphids.php) . But there are other rather strange Syrphid fly larvae, one being a slug-like larva that lives in ant nests (https://bugguide.net/node/view/146128) I used to find these under loose tree bark and logs.
And then there are Syrphid larvae known as rat-tailed maggots, and here are some: https://www.ourmshome.com/rat-tailed-ma ... to-love-😊/ Rat-tailed maggots are aquatic, and they use that long tail as a breathing snorkel. Years ago I had turned up a large number of them in a dip net, each the size of a baby gherkin. But the larvae living in my bucket were tiny and never grew up for some reason.
The fly meanwhile hung out around the bucket for a couple days. I think this was a male (as it had large compound eyes touching at the top. That is common in male flies). I suspect he was hoping for a female to arrive. It was nice that he was completely indifferent to me, so I could get quite close with the camera.
ImageBig Syrphid fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
ImageBig Syrphid fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

Scarodactyl
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Joined: Sat Apr 14, 2018 10:26 am

Re: This was not a beautiful baby

Post by Scarodactyl »

One of these got into our house somehow. It was an incredible carpenter bee mimic in everything but behavior--basically a carpenter bee on crack, zooming around and never sitting still. Amazing flies!

Marcepstein
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Re: This was not a beautiful baby

Post by Marcepstein »

Great article and very interesting. Never seen on of these before. Images are nice :!:

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