[Music] When I think of a fly I picture this: a common housefly. But flies are one of the most
biodiverse groups of animals on Earth. One family, the gale midges which you'll see a bit later,
is thought to be home to a million undescribed species. But even this common housefly,
when I see it flying at 8,000 frames per second is astonishing. [Music]
On the flip side of common, here's a fly I've only ever seen once in my life:
a cheese fly or a stink fly. It's huge. Here's one pictured on my friend Matt's finger for scale.
On this and every other fly species you'll see, you'll notice these the halteres or hind wings
that have evolved to be flapping gyroscopes. Noticing them is one of the ways you can tell
a fly apart from things like bees or wasps. This stinkfly, though, is unmistakable. Nothing else
looks like it and it's the only species in its group that occurs here in the U.S.
Getting flies to behave in front of the camera and fly in focus is a challenge.
But over the past few years I captured enough sequences to put this together.
What you'll see here is just the tiny sliver of the diversity found within this order of insects.
Flies play a lot of different roles in their environments, but let's start with some
meat-eaters. This is a blowfly. It's a carrion feeder. The iridescent adults deposit their eggs
into dead animal tissue where the larvae will stay and feed until they pupate. [Music] A different
type of carnivorous fly is this: a robber fly. These flies are predators of other flying insects
catching and feeding off of things like beetles and wasps. Some robber flies are big and fussy and
look like bees. But this one's darkly colored and only about seven millimeters long. [Music]
This is a thick-headed fly and you can find them hanging out on flowers,
but they're not there just for the nectar and pollen. They're parasitic. Species in
this group catch live bee and wasp workers and then lay an egg directly into their abdomen.
These flies like the last couple have to be agile flyers to catch other flying insects,
but some other flies take to the air at a slightly slower pace.
This is a crane fly. In flight this one is doing about 42 wing beats per second, and compare that
to the thick headed fly right before this which was flying at about 192 wing beats per second.
[Music] Here's another long-legged fly, a non-biting midge. At rest these flies
hold their front legs up in the air and they seem to do the same in flight too.
They're occasionally called Lake flies because they're larvae are aquatic and
the adults can be found sometimes in massive numbers around the water's edge.
This little guy is a gall midge there are currently over 6,000 species described but
genetic studies predict over 1 million species in this insect family. Making it the most diverse
and understudied group of animals on Earth. But flying's not the only way gall midges
get into the air. This is a gall midge larva and it has no wings or legs but it can curl
its body up into a loop then snap it open and jump across the distance of 13 body lengths.
This larval jumping behavior has only been filmed and studied in one other species of gall
midge so there's likely tons more out there with similar ways of getting into the air.
Larvae of this fly hang out on plants and eat aphids, it's a hoverfly or a flowerfly.
Like the name suggests you can find the adults visiting flowers and feeding off
the nectar and pollen. They have a bee-like appearance but this one's short antennae,
sleek abdomen, and flapping halteres give it away as a fly.
These are yellow soldier flies or compost flies. The larvae live in and feed off of
rotten vegetation and the adults, with their iridescent eyes and yellow and green bodies,
are one of my favorite looking flies out of all the ones I filmed. [Music]
This is a fungus gnat. While some fungus gnat larvae are predaceous, most of them
feed off fungus and are what you'd see if you found a mushroom cap infested with worms.
Like the midges earlier, these seem to fly with their front legs up and leading the way. [Music]
Here's a different fly from a different gnat family, the darkwing fungus gnats. The ones
flying here are all females. This picture shows the distinct orange abdomen of the female as
its mating with a uniformly dark colored male on the left. This is another family
of flies where we've only described less than 10 percent of the total species diversity. [Music]
Around my part of North Carolina this is the most common fly you'll see resting on leaves if you go
for a walk in the woods, it's a lauxaniid fly. While they're common, they don't have a common
name instead lauxaniid is just short for the Latin name of the family Lauxaniidae. And finally,
some of the showiest flies we have, the picture wing flies. This one I found on the trunk of a
tree in my yard scurrying around flashing its patterned wings up and down from its body.
I like how when it takes off it does a subtle head knot when it jumps into the air. [Music]
This is the other picture wing fly I was able to film, a black onion fly.
The name is because the larvae feed on cultivated onion and garlic. The adults with their black and
white striped wings are unmistakable handsome looking flies. So that's just a small bit of
the diversity of flies that live around this part of North Carolina where the lab is. I hope next
time you see a fly this will have inspired you to take a closer look. Thanks for watching. [Music]