I like the TMBG song, They'll Need A Crane, but with regard to this picture, it's only titular.
I think crane flies are really neat. If Tolkien were adapted to play to an all-fly audience, I think the elves would be played by crane flies.
The little clubs beneath the wings are halteres. As I understand it, they are balancing and stabilizing rudimentary hind wings. If instead the forewings were the rudimentary pair, we'd have to call flies "halter tops."
Did I mention I've been on a stream of consciousness kick lately?
4 comments:
Since you're showing a lot of bugs this summer, you should be (or become) acquainted with May Berenbaum, an entomologist at Champaign-Urbana.
I got this through inter-library loan: The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends
She's written others like Ninety-Nine Gnats, Nits and Nibblers.
Since bedbugs have become the pest du jour, she had an op ed in the Times last month: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/bedbugs/index.html?scp=2&sq=May%20Berenbaum&st=cse
- Fred
Cool, thanks! Sorry for the delay. Life has been absolutely insane lately.
LA PÁGINA WEB ESTÁ MUY BIEN Y ESTÉ TEMA TAMBIÉN
¡Gracias! Es muy amable de su parte. Me alegro de conocer a otra afficianado Macro / insectos.
(Tengo la esencia de su mensaje, aunque no soy un hablante de español, aunque tengo un poco familiarizados desde que vivía en Nuevo México cuando yo era un niño. Estoy escribiendo a través del traductor de Google, así que espero que mi mensaje viene a través de bien.)
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