Another group of phorids with strange females are the Termitoxeniinae. In these flies, the females are found in the nests of fungus-gardening Old World termites. The males and females of at least one African species fly at the same time as their host termites’ swarming, mating and often returning to the same nest.

The females then strip off most of their wings, and incredibly, start to grow (few adult holometabolous insects have post-imaginal growth). The head and legs lengthen, and the abdomen becomes grossly swollen, eventually mimicking a termite nymph. The abdomen also has glands that produce secretions that termite lick off. Apparently, they act as appeasement compounds that help integrate the fly into the termite society.

These flies are found in Africa to Southeast Asia. My colleague in England, Dr. Henry Disney, has done most of the modern taxonomy of Termitoxeniinae, including recognizing that the males of the phorid subfamily Alamirinae were the previously “missing” males of the termitoxeniines. These males have little in the way of mouthparts, probably do not feed, and are likely short lived.

There is a lot of excitement about molecular phylogeny, DNA “barcoding”, whole genome sequencing, and other high-tech advances that will enable us to better understand flies (and other organisms). Doubtlessly, this is where the big money and prestigious Science articles will be concentrated. But for those of us working with whole animals, and not just their DNA, there are a different set of priorities that are no less important. Understanding the world’s Diptera biodiversity at the organism level requires (in my opinion) the following:

1) More exploration, more collecting. We live in a time of great opportunity. There is easy availability to go to previously remote and inaccessible parts of the world, and to make collections there. On the other hand, other people can get there too, cut the forest, and cause the extinction of thousands of species.

Collections need to grow if we are going to document life on this planet. Museums need to plan for this type of growth, and curators need to push for it.

I could go on and on about this point, but I think most of you who are reading this are already part of the choir.

2) More study of life history and larvae. The immature stages and way of life of most species of flies are unknown. Terrestrial fly larvae are all but unidentifiable past the family level, and some families do not even have any larvae described. What each fly species does during its larval stage is almost equally poorly known. What are we going to do with all of the phylogenies being generated if we don’t know life history information about our organisms to plug into the framework?

3) More study of Baltic amber fossils. Diptera are the most frequent inclusions in 40 million year old Baltic amber. Most paleontologists can only dream about seeing intact specimens of their organisms. We, on the other hand, have the window into the past. I know all groups of flies are not common in amber, but those that are found there need to be integrated with our knowledge of extant flies. There are still huge deposits Baltic amber that have been untouched, and museums have thousands of specimens waiting to be examined by experts in the modern fauna.

Those are my priorities. If you have others, feel free to comment. I have some ideas about how to push these agendas forward, if dipterists can continue to work together.

In a previous post “What is so great about phorids,” I showed photos of 3 strange looking phorid flies. The first of these is a female that has a body form we call limuloid, after the horseshoe crab Limulus. This is a defensive body form that allows the female fly to live within a nest of ants or termites. The rounded body form, with few large setae, makes it difficult for an ant or termite to grab them (at least, that is the theory!). They used to be all categorized in a group called the Aenigmatiinae, but our knowledge of phorid phylogeny is changing as we know more and more about the groups, so the Aenigmatiinae probably won’t be around as a name much longer.

The name bearing genus for this former group is Aenigmatias, a northern hemisphere genus that includes about a dozen species. The females have a classic limuloid shape, whereas the males are much more normal in appearance and carry the females around in copula. These flies are parasitoids of Formica ant pupae, although no modern work has been done on their natural history.

All of the rest of these flies live in termite nests. That makes me skeptical, in part, that they form a natural group with Aenigmatias. Here is the Southeast East Asian genus Epicnemis:

The Old World tropical genus Psyllomyia is found in both Africa and Southeast Asia:

The Southeast Asian genus Palpiclavina is less limuloid than some of the others, as it has retained wings and large setae:

But the most limuloid of the phorid females are those of the genus Thaumatoxena, whose abdomens are completely fused into a carapace-like shell:

Note that the large round things on the head are not eyes; they are antennae. The true eyes are extremely small, and on the very side of the head.