FRAGILE BEAUTY

winged fragility,  transparent beauty, lace-like lifeless in two days.

u got any more of them mayflies??

What will Lily do? Watch the Weee Season 2 Premier to find out!

Mayflies, shadflies, fishflies. What you call them may depend on where you grew up. They should never be referred to as June bugs though, even though they appear in June, because that’s a different insect entirely. I grew up calling them fishflies, aptly named because the giant heaps of them that appeared under streetlights in the morning smelled like, well, rotting fish. The proper common name is the burrowing mayfly.

Mayflies are aquatic insects, living most of their life in the sediments at the bottom of lakes. We typically see them only when they emerge as adults. They have a very short adult lifespan – a day or two – they emerge, mate, lay eggs and die. They don’t eat as adults and don’t even have mouthparts. So the good thing is that they will never bite you.

Burrowing mayflies tend to hatch synchronously resulting in a mass emergence, so in a good mayfly year, numbers can seem overwhelming. The downside is that they can make roads slippery, and clog drains and gutters, and they don’t smell all that great. That’s it though, remember when I said they don’t have mouth parts? They don’t bite or eat your plants. Lots of mayflies are a good actually a good thing – mayflies are an indicator of the health of the lake bottom – if its clean and well oxygenated mayflies thrive, but low oxygen levels at the lake bottom, pollutants, invasive species and habitat destruction all impact the mayfly population.  

 Mayflies in the news:

Canadian town overrun by fish flies