Night Flyers

A sampling of the children of the night, all pulled to the lights of Bradford, MA during my recent week away from NYC.




This last is a giant crane fly of some kind. I only noticed this detail upon examining the image: the two club-like structures beneath the wings. Then I stumbled across what they are, literally stumbled, with my fingers, as I was fanning through Richard Dawkins’ Greatest Show on Earth. They’re the halteres, which “swing like very high-speed Indian clubs,” acting as tiny gyroscopes, helping to stabilize the flying beastie. Most insects have four wings; Diptera, the flies, as their order name suggests, have two. But they also have these halteres, which are descended from ancestral wings; in the embryo, they are wings, until, following gene expression, they aren’t.