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Don’t Call The SWAT Team! These 9 Flies Are Local Delights

Robber flies - Holcocephala - Robber flies are among the most agile predators in the insect world. Larger specimens can take down bees and dragonflies while small ones, like this gnat ogre, capture ants and small flies .
Robber flies - Holcocephala - Robber flies are among the most agile predators in the insect world. Larger specimens can take down bees and dragonflies while small ones, like this gnat ogre, capture ants and small flies .
Robber flies - Holcocephala - Robber flies are among the most agile predators in the insect world. Larger specimens can take down bees and dragonflies while small ones, like this gnat ogre, capture ants and small flies .
Credit Matt Bertone
Robber flies - Holcocephala - Robber flies are among the most agile predators in the insect world. Larger specimens can take down bees and dragonflies while small ones, like this gnat ogre, capture ants and small flies .

What makes a fly a fly? Well sure, they have wings. But importantly, only two. The larger category for flies is Diptera, which tells you this if you break it down: In Greek, “di” means two (like divide or dialogue), and “ptera” means wing (like pterodactyl). 

Host Frank Stasio celebrates BugFest with entomologists Christine Goforth and Matt Bertone.

Lots of other insects have four wings, but flies’ back wings evolved into a set of gyroscopes that let the insects balance themselves in-flight and perform the twisting acrobatics that makes them hard to smack.

 

Many flies wave their highly patterned wings to signal to mates and foes. The peacock fly - Callopistroyia annulipes - holds its wings upright to show off the patterns while walking back and forth. Peacock fly larvae live under the bark of dead trees.
Credit Matt Bertone
Many flies wave their highly patterned wings to signal to mates and foes. The peacock fly - Callopistroyia annulipes - holds its wings upright to show off the patterns while walking back and forth. Peacock fly larvae live under the bark of dead trees.

Host Frank Stasio flies away with Diptera experts Matt Bertone and Chris Goforth. Bertone is the director of the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic at North Carolina State University. Goforth is the head of citizen science at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. BugFest: A Virtual Infestation is hosting remote events from Monday, Sept. 14 through Saturday, Sept. 19.

Goforth shares all sorts of fun facts about aquatic flies on Friday from 10 to 11 a.m., and both Bertone and Goforth will co-present “Bug Blitz 2020” on Saturday from 9 to 10 a.m. Immediately after, learn all about local flies with Bertone. Later that night at 8 p.m., Goforth and others at the museum will throw a “Party at Your Porchlight” where they will show off some of the insects that only come out at night. Attend and get help identifying the insects circling the light.

You can check out the full schedule and register here.  

Stilt-legged flies - Micropezidae - are charismatic, medium-sized flies that often mimic wasps by waving their front legs to fake antennae. They dance around on substrates near rotting vegetable matter where their larvae develop.
Credit Matt Bertone
Stilt-legged flies - Micropezidae - are charismatic, medium-sized flies that often mimic wasps by waving their front legs to fake antennae. They dance around on substrates near rotting vegetable matter where their larvae develop.

Fully-grown, mosquitoes are known for transmitting deadly diseases to humans. However as larvae, they provide important food for larger species, like dragonflies.
Credit Christine Goforth
Fully-grown, mosquitoes are known for transmitting deadly diseases to humans. However as larvae, they provide important food for larger species, like dragonflies.

Other BugFest events:

"Paleozoic Megabugs! — Giant Arthropods from Before the Dinosaurs"

Saturday, Sept. 19, 2-2:45 

During the early days of life on land, the skies were filled with enormous insects, giant millipedes munched on decaying plants, and huge scorpions lurked beneath the trees. Learn about these impressive arthropods and the Paleozoic world that they inhabited in this talk from Museum paleontologist Christian Kammerer.

"Caterpillarology"

Saturday, 3-4 pm

George Carlin said that "the caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity." Not this time! Learn all about caterpillars — their amazing ability to eat (and poop), the transformations they go through as they grow, the ways they defend themselves from hungry predators and the incredible variety of colors and shapes they come in.

Most mosquitoes are the bane of humans, but not the elephant mosquito - Toxorhynchites rutilus. These large, blue mosquitoes with a bent proboscis feed enough as larvae to not need blood as adults. Even more important, their larvae feed on other mosquito larvae, serving to control pest species.
Credit Matt Bertone
Most mosquitoes are the bane of humans, but not the elephant mosquito - Toxorhynchites rutilus. These large, blue mosquitoes with a bent proboscis feed enough as larvae to not need blood as adults. Even more important, their larvae feed on other mosquito larvae, serving to control pest species.

  

Hover or flower flies are a hugely diverse family containing numerous bee and wasp mimics. Adults are common at flowers and larvae do many things, from feeding on aphids to living in rotting wood or putrid water.
Credit Matt Bertone
Hover or flower flies are a hugely diverse family containing numerous bee and wasp mimics. Adults are common at flowers and larvae do many things, from feeding on aphids to living in rotting wood or putrid water.

 

This female boxwood leafminer is laying her eggs inside the leaf tissue of a common boxwood plant. Her larvae are pests that will develop inside the leaf over their year- long life cycle, creating small unsightly blisters.
Credit Matt Bertone
This female boxwood leafminer is laying her eggs inside the leaf tissue of a common boxwood plant. Her larvae are pests that will develop inside the leaf over their year- long life cycle, creating small unsightly blisters.
Black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens) are found across the word, where they breed in rotting vegetable matter and dung. They are important consumers of compost here in North Carolina and the larvae can be used as highly nutritious food for animals, and even humans.
Credit Matt Bertone
Black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens) are found across the word, where they breed in rotting vegetable matter and dung. They are important consumers of compost here in North Carolina and the larvae can be used as highly nutritious food for animals, and even humans.

Gall midges are extremely diverse and many are tightly associated with their plant hosts, where the larvae create elaborate growths called galls. Here the galls of three different species in the same genus can be seen on their host, bald cypress.
Credit Matt Bertone
Gall midges are extremely diverse and many are tightly associated with their plant hosts, where the larvae create elaborate growths called galls. Here the galls of three different species in the same genus can be seen on their host, bald cypress.

 

 

Copyright 2020 North Carolina Public Radio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
Grant Holub-Moorman is a producer for The State of Things, WUNC's daily, live talk show that features the issues, personalities and places of North Carolina.