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Gardening for flies 4. Use Baccharis.
I recently witnessed and photographed an incredible assemblage of insects. They were on flowering female plants of Baccharis ‘Centennial’, a widely available hybrid of a plant commonly known around...
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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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Fly specialization at the LACM
We are doing something a little daring, but certainly exciting here at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. We have decided to specialize on flies. drawer of unsorted flies from the LACM...
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Something “new ” for Central America
When in Brazil a few years ago, my team of Giar-Ann Kung, Wendy Porras, and I found the spiny, brachypterous (short-winged) females of phorid genus Pheidolomyia. These flies, which live in the nests of...
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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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New flies in town
Asteiids The “new” collection of flies from Utah State University has arrived, and what a collection it is! The number of specimens and some of the cool species among the material surpasses my wildest...
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A monster in the garden
There is a voracious predator in our nature garden at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; luckily it is only about an inch long. It is a “bumble bee robber fly” of the genus Mallophora....
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Diptera blitz continues
Uber-collector Wayne Mathis The 30 participants in the Zurqui all Diptera biodiversity inventory in Costa Rica have been pushing back our veil of ignorance about the fly fauna of tropical cloud...
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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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Urban phorid flies in Los Angeles, California, USA
Last week Emily Hartop and I published a new paper on the phorid fly fauna of Los Angeles, in the journal Urban Ecosytems (get the full text here). This is the culmination of years of work by all of...
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