Snail-killing Fly

To St Olaf Natural Lands with Dan Tallman in search of a Southern Spreadwing. The day was a little too cool and too cloudy for the damselflies to be active, so unfortunately we couldn't locate the spreadwing Dan hoped to find. The one dragonfly we found, a Common Green Darner hanging in a thick stand of grass, was too cold to even whirr its wings in order to warm up and fly away.

One oddity we did happen upon was a Snail-killing Fly standing on top of a heap of dead slug at the tip of a leaf. Talk about living in squalor, the life cycle of some of these flies has the adult fly killing the host snail or slug, and the subsequent young larvae living in and feeding on the decomposing flesh. While these flies are very common around ponds, this was the first time I'd seen one with its host.

I spent much of the day working on some rough translations of a Russian dragonfly book recently acquired, Dragonflies of Siberia by V. Belyshev (1974). Ever after reading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Tolstoy's Resurrection in college, I've been an avid admirer of Russian novelists and poets. This led to years of exploration among Russian composers---Taneyev, Myaskovsky, Shostakovich, Weinberg, Ustvolskaya, and others. More recently I've enjoyed the tradition of Russian chess, admiring and replaying games by masters such as Chigorin, Alekhine, Bronstein, Karpov, and Kasparov. Now, expanding my research on the dragonflies of the genus Sympetrum, I've discovered the work of Russian odonatologists. Unlike the literature and chess books, scant amounts of their work has been translated into English, so I find myself nudged to try to learn the language, even if in a limited way.

Posted on May 25, 2017 04:12 AM by scottking