Prairie Natural History | The Prairie Ecologist

Please join me for a moment to appreciate a fly that eats rotting vegetation and looks like it is wearing a gas mask while doing it. Oh, it also has gorgeous decorative wings and likes to blow bubbles. Yep, you read that correctly.

*Delphinia picta*on a sunflower at Lincoln Creek Prairie – Aurora, Nebraska.

Delphinia picta, a picture-winged fly, comes across as eccentric, to say the least. Its appearance, alone, is remarkable. The wings are distinctively shaped and patterned, and its long face really does look like it’s wearing a gas mask. Though small (about 7mm in length), it’s a species that will catch your eye if you glance its way.

Both the adults and larvae of D. picta feed on rotting vegetation. Mama flies lay their eggs in rotting vegetation, the larvae hatch out and feed on the same rotting vegetation, and after they pupate and become adults, they keep feeding on that same rotting vegetation – or a suitable subsitute. It must taste good. Oh, adults have also been documented eating the fermenting poop left behind by tree-boring long-horned beetles. You know, for a change of pace.

*Delphinia picta* can be distinguished from other similar species by the pattern on its wings, the dark-colored top of its abdomen, and its long gas-mask-looking face.

The aforementioned bubble blowing behavior appears to be a result of the fly regurgitating a little of its most recent meal (likely rotting vegetation) and holding it as a bubble protruding from its mouth. This might be used as part of a mating ritual (hubba hubba) or as a way to evaporate some of the liquid from its food for easier digestion. Or maybe both.

I looked all over online for a common name for this terrific species, but I couldn’t find anything besides Latin. That seems unconscionable to me. If there ever was a fly that deserved a nickname, this is it. Let’s see if we can come up with one, shall we?

Since picta means painted, that seems like an obvious component of any name we choose. Since it prefers (did I mention this already?) to eat rotting vegetation, we could potentially call it the “Painted Compost Fly”, but I don’t love that.

Any fly with a face like this deserves a good nickname.

I guess we could just go with “painted fly”, but that’s too plain for such an interesting species. I think we’ve got to include something about its diet. I have a suggestion, but I don’t know if it’ll catch on. I looked up synonyms for rotting and decaying and one of the more fun options is putrefying. That’s a word we can work with. See what you think of this option:

The Painted Putrefly.

Yes? No? Can you do better?

One of my favorite aspects of my square meter photography project has been the chance to closely follow the lives of individual organisms over time. For example, I’ve closely followed the progress of the two butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) plants within the boundaries of my square meter plot. The plants bloomed beautifully back in late June, which was great, though fewer pollinators visited the flowers than I had hoped. Perhaps correlated with that, only one seed pod was produced between those two plants. Since then, I have been watching that one pod very very closely…

On the morning of September 24, the pod was just starting to open.

This week, that pod finally opened up, giving me the long-awaited chance to photograph some milkweed seeds within my plot. As it turns out, it’s a good thing I was vigilant, because that pod opened up and emptied itself out out very quickly. Within only a few days, the pod went from tightly closed to completely devoid of seeds.

By the afternoon of the same day (24th) the pod had opened up much more, exposing the seeds, which were beginning to dry out and fluff up.

The next day, September 25, the pod was wide open and seeds were beginning to fly out.

I was traveling on the 26th, so didn’t get to check in on my plot. By the 27th, only three days after the pod opened, it was empty. Some of the seeds landed close by, but others flew much further away.

While many of the seeds were blown well out of my little plot, a handful got stuck on adjacent plants, giving me the chance to photograph them. Here are some photos of those seeds as they were coming out of the pod or after they got hung up within the borders of my plot.