Black Fly with Red Eyes and Red Legs
The kids’ wading pool[1] was left in the yard all winter, and it was full of icy water when we had an early snow-melt on March 19, 2012[2]. Which is when Rosie found this fly drowning in it. So she rescued it and brought it to me.
Being cold and wet, with its wings kind of stuck together by the moisture, it was willing to hold still for a little while for a few pictures. Once it dried off, it quickly became very active, and we lost it. So all of these pictures are of a slightly soggy fly and may not look typical.
The red eyes, and the long reddish-brown legs, look like they should be somewhat useful ID features. The abdomen was pretty plump, but there could be a lot of reasons for that (including swallowing a lot of water while it was drowning), so that may or may not be characteristic of the species.
After a long and unproductive battle with BugGuide’s search tool, I posted the pictures and got a suggestion from John F. Carr that it was probably one of the Dung Flies in the family Scathophagidae. BugGuide says that there are about 150 species in this family in North America, but only have pictures identified to species of 7 of them. So, I only had about a 5% chance of finding a match there. And I lost the gamble.
So, anyway. The family gets their name from the fact that some prominent members of the family raise their maggots in animal dung. And the rest of the family all gets tarred with the same brush[3], even though the majority of them have maggots that are leaf-miners, or stem-borers, seed-eaters, or aquatic predators, or predators in wet leaf-litter, and don’t even go near animal droppings. The adults are evidently all predatory, mostly eating other, smaller flies and their maggots.
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[1] A very cheap wading-pool. $10 at Wal-Mart. We’ve actually been using it more as an outdoor aquarium for raising frogs and keeping small fish, than as a wading pool.
[2] Well, early for us. I realize that for most of the country, March is early spring, not late winter, but for us March is usually still cold and snowy. And, in this case, the melt didn’t last. There was still a blizzard to follow in mid-April.
[3] Which just goes to show that it only takes one relative doing something really appallingly disgusting to turn the whole family into social pariahs.
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Why don’t you put the photo on diptera.info?
Great way to bring the family together.
I can usually depend on March 15 to signal the all clear for freezes here in North Florida.
I love Bug Guide, but sometimes, with insects, it’s just too difficult to figure anything out. Still, very cool photos.
Ruud: Thanks, I didn’t know about diptera.info until just now!
Carole: Yes, it is! I think if more parents could get over their bad attitudes about insects, they’d find it was a really great way to do things with their kids.
Moe: Thanks. At least it is narrowed down to the family, which is good enough for most purposes, anyway.