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Fruit Fly with Ants on it's Wings
Xanthaciura sp.
16.725, -92.636
Field Notes
Description:
An amazing little Fruit Fly of the Family Tephritidae with incredibly realistic ants on it´s wings. They look as though they are biting onto the abdomen of the fly. This fly was only about 3 mm long, but even from a distance, it looks like ants are feeding on the fly (4th picture). The outline of the wing membrane is scarcely visible. This is definitely of the genus Xanthaciura but it could be either X. insecta or X. tetraspina. The last has 4 spines on the scutellum instead of 2, but none of the pictures I have show the scutellum clearly enough.
http://bugguide.net/node/view/105965
http://www.boldsystems.org/index.php/Taxbrowser_Taxonpage?taxid=100388
http://bugguide.net/node/view/342770/bgimage
http://bugguide.net/node/view/406449
Habitat:
Came to an ultraviolet light in the garden, San Cristobal de Las Casas, 2,200 meters.
Notes:
See Cindy Bingham Keiser's spotting of Trupanea nigricornis
(http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/79036150/fullscreen) from San Diego, California, which resembles Goniurellia tridens, mentioned below. Cindy's species has the ant-like creature on the wings facing away from the body.
This source on Flicker
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/drewgardner/305678853/in/photostream/), shows a similar Fruit Fly, also about 3 mm long from the mid-east, but the "insects" on the wings look less ant-like and also face outwards from the body. In a comment to this page, Dr. Brigitte Howarth, has identified it as Goniurellia tridens (Hendel, 1910) of the Tephritidae and says this species is known from Turkmenistan, Bukhara, India, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the UAE and Oman. It breeds in flowerheads of Asteriacae.
For very interesting reading, see this paper
(http://cadra.wordpress.com/2009/06/29/franz-heikertingers-dismissal-of-…), where Franz Heikertinger rejects natural selection as the source of mimetic resemblances and reduces such resemblances to pure coincidences. What possible survival tactic can be attributed to the patterns on this fly? If anything, it looks more tasty to a predator who would be getting 3 bugs in one shot. However, in the last picture of my series is a photo by Stephanie Sanchez, in which 2 ants are attacking a small beetle (much in the same position as the "ants" on the wings of the fly). If a predator or scavenger saw this, it might think twice about messing with something being eaten by ants.
See also "Ants, Spiders or Wishful Thinking" by Morgan Jackson http://www.biodiversityinfocus.com/blog/2013/11/06/ants-spiders-or-wish….
(http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/04/survival-of-the-extraordin…),
http://www.zu.ac.ae/main/en/colleges/colleges/college_of_sustainability….
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