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Home of the world’s smallest fly
This fly was collected at Kaeng Krachan National Park in Thailand, the country’s largest. It is a beautiful place with hot lowlands and misty highlands where the forests are crawling with land leeches....
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Phorid parasitoids of endangered ants also endangered
When ant-decapitating flies have endangered hosts, they become endangered, too. Today in the journal Zootaxa, I describe three new species of phorids found by my co-authors Marcos A. L. Braganca, Diego...
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Phorid flies and frogs
Phorid flies are characterized by my colleague, Henry Disney, as the most biologically diverse family of insects. With each passing year, we find more and more unusual lifestyles and larval food...
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Collecting weird lesser dung flies
I suppose I could have come up with a better title, but with all due respect to my friend and mentor Dr. Steve Marshall, the family Sphaeroceridae does not often lend itself to superlatives. You...
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Getting lucky
Collecting flies while they are mating is a surefire way to establish conspecific identity. Many female phorids are extremely different in appearance than the males (search this site for lots of...
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Giant flies with giant names
A Brazilian pantophthalmid. Yes, it is real. Some of the largest flies in the world belong to a family called (believe it or not) Pantophthalmidae. The tongue twisting nature of this name aside, the...
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Diptera Blitz wrap-up
Of course, our event was a tremendous success. Some highlights: - bat-netting by Carl Dick got us streblid records, bird-netting by Kimball Garrett got some hippoboscids. - Carlos de la Rosa (the...
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The Most Beautiful Fly in the World
I know that this might be controversial; after all, people generally either don’t think flies have any redeeming qualities (never mind “beauty”), or more likely for readers of this blog, have their own...
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Windows
No, not the operating system. I’m talking about physical windows in a building. If some doors, other windows, or even the whole side of the building are open, windows can be fantastic places to collect...
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The white-tailed phorid, Megaselia albicaudata
It is amazing to me that some phorid flies are found in multiple environments around the world. Less surprising are the scavengers that live mostly in human-built structures or that need scraps of our...
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