ENHS Nature Trails December 2002 Article 3

Some Insect Lore and Books
by Evelyn McConnaughey

Rather than just fuming, I have found opportunity to meditate, plan, and even to read while "on hold." By chance the most recent edition of Wings magazine was near the phone, and I had a chance to read the detailed, fascinating articles on "Flies and Flowers: An Enduring Partnership," by Carl Ann Kearns. Of course, I can only briefly mention a few choice details.

Plants attract pollinators by offering nectar, and also by heat, generated in two ways: thermogenesis or heliotroism. With over 85,000 species worldwide, flies form one of the most diverse orders of insects, Diptera. Besides those pesky members we all love to hate, many are beneficial. Along with bees, they were the primary pollinators of our earliest flowering plants. The most impressive specialized fly pollinators are the various long-tongued flies belonging to the tangle-veined group. One of these found in southern Africa has a proboscis up to three and one half inches, or three times the length of it s body! This extreme mouth adaptation enables it to take nectar from the long perianth tubes of a flower in the iris family.

An article about mosquitoes by Thomas Eisner recounts the discovery of bioacoustics by Hiram Maxim (more renowned for inventing Maxim gun.) Mosquitoes copulate in the air belly-to-belly, not the usual position for insects. For this to happen, the male must rotate its rear end 180 degrees. Since mosquitoes are "born" with the apparatus oriented the ancestral way, and need about 48 hours to twist the apparatus half a circle, their hearing apparatus is kept "on hold," making them temporarily insensitive to the amorous buzz of the female.

Also in this issue are beautifully illustrated articles about giant (up to an inch and a half in length) flower-loving flies found in our southwest, and picture-winged flies, "worth a thousand words," 4200 species including Drosophila melanogaster, the red-eyed favorite of geneticists whose heads I used to chop off by the thousands in my graduate student days. (The flys' heads, I mean!) Wings is a tiny, beautifully illustrated magazine published twice a year by the Xerces Society, an organization dedicated to protecting the diversity of life through the conservation of invertebrates. Info: 4828 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97215. ($25 a year, tax deductible, info@xerces.org; http://www.xerces.org).

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