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Musquito Hawk? Skeeter Eater? Behemothic Musquito? No, No, and No

By Leslie Mertz

That inch-long, gangly-legged insect that sneaks into your firm and bounces around the walls and ceiling is a crane fly, and despite rumors to the opposite, it is neither a predator of mosquitoes nor a colossal mosquito. And it's harmless.

Although the Internet abounds with reports of adult crane flies bitter or stinging, they practise neither.

"There has however to be constitute a predatory adult crane fly," said Matthew Bertone, PhD, a crane fly specialist and extension associate with the North Carolina Country University Department of Entomology. "They just don't have the mouthparts for it. And so no, none are blood-feeding, and none of them attack people."

In fact, many of the developed crane flies swallow very little, if at all, according to Jon Gelhaus, PhD, a boyfriend crane fly specialist and curator in the Section of Entomology at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

"Some tin can sponge up liquids, such as dew and honey water, but we don't see them practise that much," he said. "A number of them take independently evolved long mouthparts, and they'll visit flowers to accept upwardly nectar."

The slight diet is fine because developed crane flies typically live merely a affair of days. Crane flies spend most of their time every bit larvae living underwater in streams, the edges of ponds, within moisture logs, or in other damp places, then they emerge as adults for a quick mating spree before dying.

The 15,000 or and so known true crane flies in the family Tipulidae also share a somewhat similar appearance to mosquitoes. They have a narrow torso with ii long and slender wings, as well as six stilt-like legs that can be twice as long as the torso. Crane flies are diverse in wing pattern, color, and size.

"The smallest crane wing in the world could probably stand up on the head of the biggest crane fly in the world," Bertone said. The tiniest ones have bodies that are mere millimeters in length, while the largest can be more than ii inches long with leg spans topping x inches. The big differences between species, however, are found amidst the larvae.

"There are lots of crazy morphologies there," said Bertone. "Some of them accept inflatable rear ends that they use to motion through soil more hands, some take fringed setae on the finish to break the water tension, and some have these weird creeping structures, sort of like caterpillar prolegs with hooks on them, so it'southward extremely variable. We don't know much well-nigh the larvae. In fact, for many species, we take never seen the larvae."

Although scientists have a greater understanding of adults — thanks in bang-up part to the piece of work of U.Due south. entomologist Charles Paul Alexander (1889- 1981), who described a whopping 11,000 crane fly species during his illustrious career — a multitude of questions remain. For example, according to Bertone, "About of the crane flies take large optics, just we don't know how good their vision is and how much that'southward used to sense where they're going. The males in some of the groups have antennae with really elongate segments compared to females, simply we don't know what the purpose of that is."

Scientists are as well uncertain about courtship and communication. Some crane fly species engage in all-male swarms that apparently attract females, Gelhaus said. The males of other species will simply flit around their habitat with their forelegs outstretched, presumably using a contact pheromone to seek out females.

Other behaviors are also ripe for study. For case, Gelhaus has seen both males and females of several tropical species aggregate together in dark areas.

"Whole groups of individuals volition all be flight around together, sometimes bouncing at a abiding level," he said. "If you disturb them, they volition wing away, but and so in a little while they will re-amass dorsum into those areas. We actually don't know what they're doing in those situations."

Gelhaus has also seen members of some other tropical species in Peru that sandwich themselves betwixt the surface of a stream and a suspended spider web.

"They seem to be hanging upside-downwardly from the spider spider web, property onto the threads of the web without being caught in it," he said. "Behaviorally, I'd say crane flies aren't super complex in comparison to even another fly families, but there are a lot of these adaptations — including mimicry of ichneumonid wasps and other things — that really demand study and will take somebody spending some fourth dimension in the field and observing to figure out."

Scientists are as well still sorting out the evolutionary tree, peculiarly whether the big Tipulidae family should exist split into several different families. Bertone was part of a research grouping that used morphology and genetics to try to sort it out. They concluded that the bulk of the species had more in common than not and should remain in the Tipulidae family, while just one smaller family of hairy-eyed crane flies (Pediciidae) should be separated out as a sister group.

Gelhaus appreciates their assiduous tone.

"Instead of splitting upwards Tipulidae all kinds of ways, which later on prove might non take supported, they said that the weight of the prove conservatively supports two basic lineages, and I thought this was a pretty proficient fashion of approaching information technology," he said. "I expect there'll exist some changes every bit we move along, and every bit more and more than data is put to information technology, but that's only part of the nature of classification and the taxonomy. It has to evolve forth with our cognition."

There are other crane flies that fall outside the Tipulidae and Pediciidae families, but they are not as closely related. These include the phantom crane flies, winter crane flies, and primitive crane flies (Ptychopteridae, Trichoceridae, and Tanyderidae, respectively). The best known of these is the phantom crane wing Bittacomorpha clavipes, a big insect that flies with its inflated tarsi ("anxiety") helping to float its long, black-and-white legs in the air.

"Phantom crane flies are one of my favorites," Bertone said. "They're really pretty and I just like the way they wing."

Even the true crane flies alone, even so, are deceptively diverse.

"They have weird behaviors and weird morphologies," Bertone said. "I'm always seeing photos of new ones, and it but blows my mind how they wait or how they take all these crazy modifications. There are foreign, wingless, spider-like snow crane flies that are thought to live in animal burrows and crawl underneath the snow; there are modest, hairy ones; there are larger ones; there are lots of them that suck nectar — it'southward a really various and pretty amazing group."

Gelhaus agrees. He took a rather serendipitous path to his study of crane flies, with an internship at the California Academy of Sciences that but so happened to involve these insects, and he has enjoyed every minute.

"I've never regretted it," he said. "It's a very interesting grouping for me, and information technology's taken me all over the world. Crane flies were definitely the right option."

Read more than at:

"Phylogenetic synthesis of morphological and molecular data reveals new insights into the higher-level nomenclature of Tipuloidea (Diptera)" by Matthew J. Petersen, Matthew A. Bertone, Brian K. Wiegmann, and Gregory W. Courtney in Systematic Entomology, Book 35, Outcome iii, pages 526–545, July 2010.

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Leslie Mertz

Leslie Mertz, PhD, teaches summer field-biology courses, writes nearly science, and runs an educational insect-identification website, www.knowyourinsects.org. She resides in northern Michigan.

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Source: https://entomologytoday.org/2015/08/17/mosquito-hawk-skeeter-eater-giant-mosquito-no-no-and-no/

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