This is the most in-depth article I’ve ever read on New Zealand bat flies and the exciting little science-drama of their discovery and research.
These are the first flies discovered to have such an advanced almost colonial social structure, and they’re the only flies known to live in such a deep beneficial symbiosis with a mammal. There are countless other wingless flies that feed on the blood of bats but this variety is genetically unrelated to any of them and only feeds on guano.
My favorite thing about them is that, instead of simply dying like in most other insects, males who can no longer mate will just grow a lot bigger and become specialized watchmen over the eggs and larvae. When they sense a bat flying nearby, the guard males emit a high pitched buzzing (audible to humans!) to drive the bat away before it mistakenly squishes or eats them.
My favorite thing about this story is that when they were trying to collect samples from a recently abandoned bat colony, thousands of the flies climbed under the clothes of the researchers to get out of the cold and even though it felt super freaky they all knew the flies were incapable of biting and just doing what they’d usually do to hitch a ride on bats, so they didn’t fight it and later they successfully raised all the flies they “caught” that way on a diet of mashed up bananas.
My second favorite thing about this story is learning that you could just keep these on a diet of mashed up bananas. WTF. Give me some.
Edit/ I also fucking love that their eggs have long spines on them and are laid all over the colony walls so densely they look like moss. I’ve always been enamored with “encrusting” organisms and “mats” of biota like moss and lichen and mold and the thought of one that’s entirely insect eggs is the coolest possible shit to me.
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