[Fly Control] What Fly Am I?

When teaching pest identification to pest professionals who have no entomological training, it is often difficult to have them grasp the concept of anatomical features as the key identifying characters. We tend to learn identification by memorizing the shape and coloration of a given creature, which is easy when you’re identifying a dog from a cat. But take two closely related song birds or two closely related flies and shape, size and color are nearly identical. One has to focus on the minute differences between the two. Having knowledge of these anatomical differences is the key to successful identification of insects, spiders, and all other animals and plants.

For those of you with no formal entomology training, you may not realize that flies are one of the most difficult groups of insects to identify to species, even to the family level in some cases. The differences may come down to the specific patterns of veins in the wings or to the number of setae (hairs) on a particular thoracic plate. Fortunately, in structural pest control, one needs knowledge of only a relative few flies of the 120,000 known species to identify these to family, genus or species.

This article should be used to test your knowledge of fly identification without seeing the insect. At right, one or more characteristics is described. Take your shot associating the correct fly to the description. All flies described on the next page are listed in the box on the right. The answers appear by clicking HERE. The same fly may be described more than once. Good luck!

The author is a board certified entomologist and manager of Technical Services, Terminix International, Memphis, Tenn. He can be reached at shedges@giemedia.com.

1. I’m fairly small and have red eyes. What fly am I?

2. I have but three dark stripes on my thoracic pronotum, and I often have a checkerboard pattern on the top of my abdomen. What fly am I?

3. I’m pretty large, brown and have long, thin legs and wings, but I have no visible mouthparts. What fly am I?

4. I look like a house fly, but I have a stiff proboscis protruding under my head. What fly am I?

5. I am a small, brown fly with a sharply arched thorax. What fly am I?

6. My body is black and my eyes are dark red. What fly am I?

7. Both of us flies have four dark stripes on top of our thoracic pronotum. What two flies are we?

8. My body is thin, my legs are too and I have thin, biting mouthparts extending from my head. What fly am I?

9. I have yellow hairs on the outer, top front of my thorax. What fly am I?

10. I’m a small, black fly with bronze-colored tints on my thorax. I fold my iridescent wings flat over my abdomen. What fly am I?

11. If you look at my wing, you’ll see the top two veins are heavily sclerotized (thick). I’m also small and brown in color. What fly am I?

12. My wings are covered with tiny hairs, as is my body. What fly am I?

13. I may be very tiny or up to 1/4 inch long. I have thin wings and legs, but the first segment of my legs, my coxae, are fairly long. What fly am I?

14. I’m a medium-sized gray fly that is fairly common. The fourth vein in my wing curves sharply upward at the outer edge of the wing. What fly am I?

15. Most of the flies in my family are metallic in varying colors of blue, green, bronze or black. What fly am I?

16. I have biting mouthparts, and I’m about ½ inch long. My wings often have dark markings on them. What fly am I?

17. I’m about 1 inch long, and I have two somewhat transparent spots on the upper front of my abdomen. What fly am I?

18. I get confused with a fruit fly, but I have a small head. What fly am I?

19. All of the veins in my wings run parallel to each other. What fly am I?

20. I am a black fly around 1/4 inch long. I may resemble a house fly, but I fly a lot more slowly. I fold my wings flat over my body. What fly am I?

Click here for the answers.