Snowfly
Reader Tim Eisele sends in this crazy photograph. This a snowfly, a cold-blooded insect that actually lives part of its active life cycle wandering around in the snow! This is cold-adaptation at its finest–the snowflies actually come out to mate and lay eggs in the snow.
Related to craneflies, they have small halteres behind their wings like their cousins. This one doesn’t have wings; I don’t know if they lose them during part of their life cycle or if they just don’t have them at all. In which case, I have to wonder, why aren’t they called snowwalks?
Tim has written up an even better report on this critter, so I’ll just direct you to his own blog, somethingscrawlinginmyhair.com, which I am forced to admit is a way better blog name than insectpod.com. He’s also got a few more pictures of this snowfly. Check it out.
Thanks, Tim!
Slowly getting the site back onto an even keel. It's nice to get back into the old posting rhythm.
tceisele said,
January 23, 2008 @ 7:35 am
According to two of the world experts on snowflies*, they never have wings, and the are only called “flies” because they are related to the other true flies, not because they can actually fly or anything. I agree that “Snowwalks” or “Snowcrawlers” would make more sense.
Speaking of which, I’ve been finding out that there are actually quite a number of insects that come out at just slightly subfreezing temperatures. For instance, there’s these critters that are related to cockroaches, called “rock-crawler”
, that live in mountains up near the snow line, and are so cold-adapted that if you pick them up and hold them in your hand, the heat will kill them! Then there are certain species of stoneflys, springtails, midges, and others that come out in the temperature range of 25 - 32 deg. F. Next time it warms up to that temperature range**, I think I’ll grab the camera, strap on the old snowshoes, and see what I can find . . .
*That is to say, both of them.
**The way things are going, that will be sometime in March.
???? said,
June 15, 2008 @ 8:39 am
Really? I thought males have wings, whereas females are wingless.