Natural History Photographs

The stacked firewood was heavily infested with woodboring insects. These produced lots of wood frass, visible as the fine wood-dust accumulated on the bark in the top photograph. The bee-fly was tapping the tip of her abdomen into the frass, a behaviour similar to that of other beeflies - but normally the material is sand, not wood frass! The functional significance of this behaviour is obscure, of course, but might it be to camouflage the odour of the eggs to be oviposited in the nest of the host??

Another bee-fly, Hemipenthes morio, resting on a track in the forest on a mountain slope. The bee-fly exhibited typical perching behaviour: flying from its rest to inspect moving objects, but returning time and again to the center of its territory.

Female Robberfly with prey, a Sarcophagid fly. Sarcophagids are viviparous - that is, they do not lay eggs but gives live birth to larvae that developed inside the female's body. Normally the control of birth must be tightly regulated, but here the prey fly must have lost control over the muscles regulating birth, undoubtedly because she was being sucked dry by the robberfly. Technically, one might describe this as predation-induced abortus provocatus...

This fly showed clearly perching behaviour. It was sitting on grass stems that were quite high, about in the middle. Regularly it flew away, but after such 'inspection flights' (?), it predictably returned to the same spot - albeit not always exactly to the same grass stem or leaf.