Crane Fly

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Mosquito Catcher?
Location: Central Lake, Michigan
July 3, 2011 9:32 am
Hi!
Looove your site, and your helpfulness! I have today, three photos of what my mother always called a ”mostquito catcher”. I was hoping that you would be able to tell me what this bug is (or if she was correct). And if you know if they can bite/harm people. I have a close up of the body, a view of the top, and a side view for you (s/he was a great model, lol). This insect has very long legs, and is about the size of my palm. Thanks in advance for your wonderful help!
Signature: Mom in Michigan

Crane Fly

Dear Mom in Michigan,
This is a Crane Fly and they do not prey upon mosquitos. We have also heard them called Mosquito Hawks. Crane Flies do not bite.

Thank you so much! How interesting! I really appreciate you taking time to let me know!

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¶ Posted 03 July 2011 § ‡ Comments (0) °

Phantom Crane Fly

Mosquito/Spider/Zebra/Ninja
Location: Jacobson, MN
June 29, 2011 8:23 pm
So for 19 years of living out here in the boondocks, I’ve been…not terrorized, but generally startled and freaked out by these little buggers flittering around the house. Nobody else had ever seen them until my sister in law came over and we caught one, and I was finally able to see it up close. Could someone possibly clue me in as to what they are? They’re no real nuisance, I’m just curious after all these years.
Signature: Slightly Triumphant

Phantom Crane Fly

Dear Slightly Triumphant,
We need to make this brief. This is a Phantom Crane Fly, Bittacomorpha clavipes.

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¶ Posted 02 July 2011 § ‡ Comments (0) °

Crane Fly

What’s his name?
Location: San Ramon, CA
May 10, 2011 9:10 am
May 7, 2011
San Francisco Bay Area (San Ramon, CA)
Thank you very much for your wonderful work and this amazing website. Inspiring!
There is a cheery tree in the backyard that is severely infested with black aphids, thousands and thousands of them. To stop the ants from making things worse, I wrapped the trunk with Tangelfoot. With ants gone, there is a beneficial insects lovefest on that tree. There are hundreds and hundreds of lady and soldier beetles all over the tree, eating aphids, mating and laying eggs.
Yesterday we had 25mph winds and the bugs were keeping a low profile, except for this long legged fellow. He had spread out on a leaf and was content going for a roller-coaster ride on a shaky branch. What’s his name?
Signature: Max

Crane Fly

Hi Max,
We are happy to hear that with a little assistance, nature is taking care of your Aphid problem organically. This is a Crane Fly, and despite looking like a very large Mosquito, it is perfectly harmless.

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¶ Posted 10 May 2011 § ‡ Comments (0) °

Crane Fly from Singapore

Unknown Freaky Mosquito Like Insect
Location: Singapore
April 4, 2011 8:15 am
Hi there,
I guess your site is my first reference when it comes to asking ”what’s this bug” again question so bear with me when I bug you guys again (pun intended). I love your site really. Anyways, I found this along with my photographer friends while trekking a narrow path of a forest. Lo and behold we found this very unusual insect on a leaf. Looks like a hybrid of a mosquito! We already cut the leaf away from the tree and laid it on a log to picture it fully, and still it never bothered to move nor fly away. Maybe you guys would know what insect is this and what species.
Thanks again.
Signature: Giovanni

Crane Fly

Hi Giovanni,
This is a Crane Fly, and it resembles a Mosquito because both Crane Flies and Mosquitoes are in the insect order Diptera, which includes all Flies. We do not recognize the species. We believe we found a match on FlickR that is identified as genus Hexatoma, but we cannot substantiate that.

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¶ Posted 04 April 2011 § ‡ Comments (0) °

Crane Fly

Wedding Bug
Location: Somerset, Pennsylvania
November 17, 2010 4:02 pm
Hi,
I recently was a bridesmaid in a wedding in rural Pennsylvania. The bridal party stayed at a cabin in the woods, and this bug resided on the mirror in the bathroom throughout the weekend. It never, ever moved. We weren’t even sure it was real until a well-intentioned boy ”disposed” of it for us ”girls” because he was sure that we hadn’t seen it, and if we had, we would have ”freaked out.” Unfortunately, the wedding bug is gone, but I’d love to know what it was!
Signature: Amanda

Crane Fly

Hi Amanda,
The uninvited guest to the wedding is a Crane Fly, a harmless insect that is sometimes mistaken for a large mosquito and is also erroneously called a Mosquito Hawk by folks who believe they prey upon mosquitoes.

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¶ Posted 18 November 2010 § ‡ Comments (0) °

NOT Four Winged Crane Fly: Two Crane Flies and a Hangingfly

Are these Crane Flies?

Insect Collection

Are these Crane Flies?
Location: Wilmington, Delaware
October 3, 2010 12:53 pm
We are doing a bug project in fith grade. My school is The Independence School in Delaware. I’ve been collecting insects in the past 4 months. I have these 3 flies that look almost the same. I know the one at the right bottom is a Crane Fly. The other two I could not identify in the bug guide. The top one has 1 pair of wings and the abdomen/tail ends with a bulb. The bottom left fly has two pairs of wings and a skiny abdomen. The eyes are bigger and it looks more like a Dragonfly or a Damselfly, but the legs are very long. Can you please help me? Thanks
Signature: Austin

Hangingfly

Dear Austin,
First we want to congratulate you on doing your research well for your science project. We will respond to the easier of your two queries first. The Crane Fly with the bulb shaped abdomen is actually a male. Females have pointier abdomens. An excellent resource for information on Crane Flies is the Crane Flies of Pennsylvania website. The Morphology page of the site indicates this: “Abdomen is long and slender and with nine evident segments. The apex of abdomen in male enlarged into a club-shaped hypopygium, in female extended into elongate, acutely pointed ovipositor. They can be sexed visually in the field by these two characters.“ The bigger mystery is the extra pair of wings. We don’t know if this is a genetic mutation or something else entirely, but if it is a mutation, we suspect some museum would love to have your specimen. We are going to contact Dr. Chen Young, and expert in Crane Flies, but a few days ago we got an “out of office” reply to an email indicating that he is collecting in the field. It appears that you have three Crane Flies and one is an aberration. Identifying the exact species of Crane Flies is a real challenge and we do not feel confident enough to attempt anything conclusive. With that said, the individual on the right of your photo showing all three might be Tipula paterifera, based on a comparison to photos posted to BugGuide. We hope Dr. Young gets back to us soon to solve the other mystery.

Crane Fly male

CORRECTION: Thanks to Eric Eaton
Daniel:
Not a crane fly. This is a “hangingfly,” a type of scorpionfly in the order Mecoptera, family Bittacidae:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/9232
Neat find!
Eric

Thanks so much Eric. We feel a bit embarrassed at this moment because the thought of a Scorpionfly did run through our mind, yet we didn’t research that before posting.

Dr. Chen Young provides some identifications
October 5, 2010
Hi Daniel,
This bug is not a trur fly it is a hangingfly in the family Bittacidae of the order Mecoptera. It does look like a crane fly except it has four wings.
Chen

Thanks Chen,
I have already learned about this embarrassing misidentification.
Thanks
Daniel

Hi Daniel,
Hey we all make misidentifications and mistakes.
The two crane flies in his project are: the male is Tipula borealis
http://iz.carnegiemnh.org/cranefly/tipulinae.htm#Tipula_(Beringotipula)_borealis
and the female is Tipula oleraceae, one of the two introduced european crane flies.
http://iz.carnegiemnh.org/cranefly/tipulinae.htm#Tipula_(Tipula)_paludosa
I have already forwarded my answer to your mating crane flies from India to you. Let me know when you get it.
Chen

Update from Austin
October 8, 2010
Dear Mr. Marlos,
Thank you for your help. My project is to collect 10 insects and identify them. My teacher gave us 8 orders to find and pin. We are allowed to find two from the same order. Now, this would be the 9th order not on her list. I am glad that I found an order that is not on her list. I will send you a picture of my project when I am done. It is due on Oct 18, 2010.
I like your web site. It helped me a lot on my insect project. I could not identify some of the insects until Mrs. Godsey told us about your web site. The first time I logged into your site, one of the insects was your bug of the month for September. It was the Stump Stabber, Giant Ichneumon. I found it during my summer vacation in Canada. I could not identify it for a long time before then. I was so excited when there it was on your front page. Then I saw a leaf footed bug picture someone had send you a question. And there it was again look just like one of my insect.
Thank you and have a great weekend.
Austin

Dear Austin,
We are happy that you and your teacher, and hopefully your entire class, has found our website helpful. It is our mission to try to share a sense of wonder with the lower beasts and to educate the public regarding the important place these bugs fill in the intricate web of life that occupies our fragile planet. It is also refreshing to hear from such an industrious student since we get so many desperate requests to do people’s homework when they realize that they have procrastinated on their entomology collection projects.

add NOT Four Winged Crane Fly: Two Crane Flies and a Hangingfly

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¶ Posted 03 October 2010 § Scorpionflies ‡ Comments (2) °

Mating Crane Flies from India and Mating relatives from Taiwan

Insect to be identified
Location: Mumbai, India
September 30, 2010 1:43 am
I just caught these insects mating (I guess) I am unable to identify these insects. I have uploaded couple of pictures which would help.
Thank you and Reagrds
Signature: Mahesh F. Pardesi

Crane Flies Mating

Dear Mahesh,
Your photos of mating Crane Flies in the family Tipulidae are stunning. This is a beautiful pair of insects. The male has the feathery antennae. We don’t know how much species information we would be able to find for Asian species, so we are going to contact an expert in the family for assistance. We generally search the Crane Flies of Pennsylvania for North American species, and Dr. Chen Young of Carnegie Museum of Natural History assists us when we have problems. Hopefully he will be able to provide a species name for us.

Mating Crane Flies

Dear Daniel,
Thank you for taking out time and replying my mail.
Atleast I know now that these are Crane Fly.
Would be eager to know the Species.
Thank You again.
Regards,
Mahesh F. Pardesi

Karl Unearths the Answer
Hi Daniel and Mahesh
These crane flies are so lovely that I couldn’t resist looking for more information. The species appears to be Pselliophora laeta (Tipulidae: Ctenophorinae). I could find only the one photo online but I did also find a matching illustration in a very old paper titled “Dipteres Exotiques Nouveaux” by M.J. Macquart (1837). It was presented under an older synonym, Ctenophora laeta. The wing pattern is very distinctive. According to Oosterbroek et al. (2006) the Ctenophorinae are all more or less spectacular and many resemble ichneumons or wasps. The comb-like antennae of the males are also distinctive. Ctenophorinae larvae all develop in decaying wood of deciduous trees and usually require old forest or orchard habitat. The genus Pselliophora is predominantly oriental in distribution and includes nearly a hundred species (so it is possible that these belong to a related and similar species). Regards. Karl

Dr. Chen Young responds
October 6, 2010
Hi Daniel,
I sent the following message on 30 of September but was rejected due to your mailbox was full. I am forwarding it again and hope you will get it this time.
Chen

September 30, 2010
Dear Daniel,
Thanks for the image and I am so glad to see the mating pair. As you may know by now that I am out of the museum and doing field research in Asia and your image really made my day since I have just seen one species of crane fly in the same group as the iamge you sent.
The crane fly of your image belong to Ctenophora (Pselliophora) group. I dont know the species for sure but I will look into it after I return to the museum where I will have references that I can check into. I am attaching one image of the one from Taiwan for your reference and you can also see the similarity they share. I schedule to return on the 22 of October and I will contact you soon after.
Later,
Chen

crane fly pselliophora taiwan chen young 271x300 Mating Crane Flies from India and Mating relatives from Taiwan

Mating Crane Flies from Taiwan

Thanks so much Chen,
We really appreciate you taking the time to resend this email while you are in the field. We are pleased to include your image of a mating related pair from Taiwan with the original posting.

Dear Daniel,
Thank you for the wonderful explanations forwarded by you Daniel. Still curious to know the species name.
Warm Regards,
Mahesh F. Pardesi

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¶ Posted 30 September 2010 § ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: bug love

Phantom Crane Fly

IDENTIFICATION
Location: Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada
August 27, 2010 11:51 am
This insect was seen flying in jewelweed beside a marshy area. It can be seen quite well in the photos, however, when in flight, this fragile bug is very difficult to focus on given how transparent it is. It was first spotted in July & was still in evidence in early August. We started to refer to these little creatures as ”the fairies” due to their ethereal appearance.
Anne

Phantom Crane Fly

Hi Anne,
It is believed that the markings and coloration of the Phantom Crane Fly enable it to avoid predation as it seems to disappear and reappear as it feebly flies through the sun dappled habitat it prefers.

Phantom Crane Fly

Daniel -
Thank you so much for this information. We were all quite intrigued by this dear little fellow and it’s kind of fun to be able to put a name to him.
Your prompt response is very much appreciated.
Anne

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¶ Posted 27 August 2010 § ‡ Comments (0) °