Yellow dung fly
| Yellow dung fly | ||||||||||||
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Yellow dung fly ( Scathophaga stercoraria ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Scathophaga stercoraria | ||||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
The yellow dung fly or common mud fly ( Scathophaga stercoraria ) is a fly from the family of dung flies (Scathophagidae).
features
The flies reach a body length of 5 to 10 millimeters. Their body is brown in color, dusted with clay yellow and densely hairy. In addition, the mesonotum with black bristles has two fine dark longitudinal lines. The face and palps are yellowish. The forehead is white-gray or pale brown, in the middle it has a red-yellow stripe that narrows towards the thorax and becomes darker. The proboscis and antennae are black, the antennae have long, feathery bristles. The legs of the males have a thick, yellowish woolly hair. There are 11 to 13 dark bristles on the outside of the tibia of the rear pairs of legs. The brownish-gray, transparent wings are red-yellow at the front edge, as are the swinging bulbs ( holders ). The female abdomen is gray-brown with black hair, while the male has a yellowish woolly hair.
Occurrence and way of life
The animals found in the Palearctic and North America are common, especially near cattle pastures . Flowers are visited, but smaller insects are also sucked out with their pointed proboscis. To mate, the animals meet on fresh, still warm manure (especially cow dung ), in which the one-millimeter-long eggs with "side wings" are laid. From this, about 10 millimeters long larvae develop , which eat other insect larvae, especially two-winged larvae , in the dung.
photos
Detail of the thorax and head
from above
of the page
swell
literature
- Heiko Bellmann : The New Cosmos Insect Guide , Franckh-Kosmos Verlags-GmbH & Co KG, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-440-07682-2
- Joachim & Hiroko Haupt: Flies and mosquitoes: observation, way of life. Naturbuch-Verlag, Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-89440-278-4 .
Web links
- Fauna Europaea: Taxonomy (English)