Super Fly: The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects
Rate it:
Open Preview
28%
Flag icon
flies seem incapable of becoming sickened by their diets.
28%
Flag icon
While the maggots munch away, they also secrete or excrete a stew of antimicrobial molecules that can kill certain bacteria.
28%
Flag icon
anthropomorphic hogwash;
28%
Flag icon
Mutualisms—in which two or more organisms benefit by associating with one another—provide
28%
Flag icon
Of the 150 described families of Diptera, at least 71 include flies that feed at flowers as adults.
28%
Flag icon
80 percent of species that humans define as food plants, rely on pollinators. Less than 7 percent of these food plants are pollinated solely by wind or water, less than 4 percent by birds, and less than 2 percent by bats, leaving close to 90 percent pollinated by insects.*
28%
Flag icon
David MacNeal
28%
Flag icon
Bugged
28%
Flag icon
“Bugs are nearly as necessary to humans ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
28%
Flag icon
By most estimates (so far), the Hymenoptera (bees and wasps) outrank flies (Diptera), beetles (Coleoptera), and butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) as pollinators of flowers.
28%
Flag icon
In arctic and alpine environments, for instance, where weather conditions suppress bee activity, flies are often the main pollinators.
29%
Flag icon
“Flies widely replace bees as main flower visitors at altitude.”
29%
Flag icon
two thirds of the fly sample in one study, 643 individuals belonging to 85 species—were not flower flies.
29%
Flag icon
As Aristotle noted nearly 2,400 years ago when he coined the name diptera, “No two-winged insect has a sting at the rear.”
29%
Flag icon
Many of our favorite fruits are at least partly pollinated by flower flies, including apple, pear, strawberry, mango, cherry, plum, apricot, raspberry, and blackberry.
29%
Flag icon
early autumn pawpaws
29%
Flag icon
Flies also pollinate herbs and vegetables, including fennel, coriander, caraway, onions, parsley, and carrots.
29%
Flag icon
In all, more than 100 cultivated crops are regularly visited by flies and depend largely on fly pollination for abundant fruit set and seed production.
29%
Flag icon
cacao is unable to fertilize itself and therefore requires insects for successful pollination.
29%
Flag icon
With the possible exception of one species of flower fly, only very small midges are known to pollinate the penny-size, whitish-pink flowers emerging directly from the cacao plant’s trunk and lower branches.
30%
Flag icon
Although cacao trees can produce prodigious numbers of flowers, even with the midges’ assistance only a tiny fraction of these will ever grow into a mature cacao pod.
30%
Flag icon
Tiny midges are the only insects known to pollinate the complicated flower of the cacao tree, from whose fruit chocolate is made.
30%
Flag icon
It took me an hour to extract the golden pockets of meat nestled amid the fibrous tissue,
30%
Flag icon
“Flowers want their visitors to keep visiting other flowers of their own species,” Mark Deyrup told me. “This is one reason why the physical appearance of flowers is highly consistent within species (barring manipulation by gardeners) and distinctive across species. Insects who visited different flowers on single foraging bouts wouldn’t be spreading much pollen to the right places. Flowers teach generalist insects to be active specialists.”
30%
Flag icon
The phenomenon by which pollinators tend to visit flowers of the same species, even where more profitable nectar sources are available, is called flower constancy.
30%
Flag icon
When Charles Darwin described flowers whose nectar reservoirs could be reached only through a narrow two-inch flower tube, he famously predicted that there must be some undiscovered insect with an equally long tongue. It was many years after Darwin’s death before such insects were discovered. The meganosed fly (Moegistorhynchus longirostris) of southern Africa, outdoing its literary counterpart Pinocchio, has a noselike proboscis that is actually the longest mouthpart—a tonguelike drinking tube—of any known fly
30%
Flag icon
there are flower flies and soldier flies that practice floral larceny by stealing nectar from heliconia flowers without aiding pollination.
30%
Flag icon
You may have heard of orchids that display plump flowers resembling the abdomens of female bees, which are irresistible to male bees.
30%
Flag icon
Some orchids direct their seductive tactics at flies.
31%
Flag icon
kleptoparasitism—the stealing of food caught by another predator. They can be found brashly snacking on the prey suspended in a spider’s web.
31%
Flag icon
Plants that encourage this kind of behavior are called kleptomyiophiles, “lovers of thieving flies.”
31%
Flag icon
The small quantities of proteins produced by these flowers suggest that they are “food deceptive.”
31%
Flag icon
In the purely biological context, flowering evolved to facilitate the transference of gametes between individuals to achieve cross-fertilization.
31%
Flag icon
Less formally, flowers represent mechanisms evolved to exploit third parties, mostly insects, to aid plant sex.
31%
Flag icon
The deception must be convincing and alluring enough to dupe the insect at least twice, for pollen must be picked up on one flower then deposited on another.
31%
Flag icon
plants that mimic carrion—like those that offer the false promise of sex—typically provide no compensation beyond sensory allurement.
32%
Flag icon
A side note to fly-inspired carrion mimicry in plants is the prevalence of flower gigantism in this assemblage.
32%
Flag icon
Among the credible theories proposed to explain the large-flower phenomenon are that such blooms, whose populations tend to be small and scattered far apart in the forest, need to be able to attract pollinators from long distances, and the long-range scent-sensitive capabilities of blowflies fit the bill.
32%
Flag icon
fungus gnats are a large group, numbering over 5,000 described species,
32%
Flag icon
Some fungi have become so codependent on their partner gnats that, like certain fruits and their pollinators, their spores can germinate only after passing through a gnat maggot’s gut.
32%
Flag icon
delicate mountain midges. The time from their aquatic emergence through mating and egg-laying to death is less than two hours.
32%
Flag icon
Romeo laments that “more courtship lives in carrion flies than Romeo,”
32%
Flag icon
Signal flies and picture-winged flies combine visual, tactile, gustatory, and probably olfactory and acoustic elements in their multisensory courtships. These flies are named for their prominently patterned wings, each of
32%
Flag icon
which they vigorously twist and flex, each independently of the other, in a motion that dipterists call paddling.
32%
Flag icon
semaphore ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
32%
Flag icon
eversible
32%
Flag icon
dance flies
32%
Flag icon
A female will not mate with a male who arrives with no gift.
32%
Flag icon
Because many species look nearly identical, species-specific courtship maneuvers can also aid species identification.
33%
Flag icon
Copulation lasts about two hours.