“This is, hands down, the weirdest insect I’ve ever filmed,” Dr. Adrian Smith explains in this Ant Lab video. “Believe it or not, this thing is a fly.” bat fly
“…like, a fly as in an insect in the same group as your standard house fly or fruit fly.
“But this fly doesn’t have wings and it barely even has a recognizable head. The weirdest thing about it is where it lives and where I found it: I collected it off a bat. It’s an ectoparasite of bats, commonly called a bat fly.”
How do you catch a bat to catch a bat fly? Where is a bat fly’s head? And what are halteres?
Join Smith and his North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences colleague, Mammalogy Collections Manager Lisa Gatens, as they catch bats on a forest pathway at night. There, Gatens can assess, tag, and release the bats for research, and Smith can collect this wingless bat-dweller.
Then see Smith’s incredible macro footage of a super speedy bat fly, filmed at 600 frames per second. (That’s around 20 times slower than reality.) He notes:
“The bat fly in this video was collected off of a Southeastern myotis (Myotis austroriparius) bat and is likely the bat fly species Basilia boardmani within the Nycteribiidae family of flies (will update if I get a confirmed species ID).”
Watch these fly and bat videos next:
• 15 species of flies take off in slow-motion
• How volunteers hand-raised an orphaned short-tailed fruit bat
• Filming bats with slow motion and thermal cameras
• How can glowing poop help bat conservation?
• The Tube-Lipped Nectar Bat has a very long tongue
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