Emergent mayfly
The emergent mayfly spends almost its whole life as a baby, hiding in a burrow in the mud at the bottom of a river or lake. Then, on a summer night, it swims up, gets wings and flies off. As a grown-up it lives only a short time.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
Sometimes so many fly at once that their swarm shows up on weather radar, like a rain cloud.
The baby digs a U-shaped tunnel in the mud and wiggles to pull fresh water through it.
After it gets wings, it sheds its skin one more time, 8 to 18 hours later, and only then is it fully grown.
At dusk the males hover in a swarm, each one facing into the wind. The whole swarm is gone by morning.
A female drops two packets into the water, each with several thousand eggs.
Most asked questions about Emergent mayfly
?How long does a mayfly live?
The baby lives in the mud for about a year. The grown-up with wings lives only a very short time.
?Do mayflies bite?
No. Grown-up mayflies cannot bite or sting and do not even eat.
?Why are there sometimes so many mayflies?
Huge numbers can come out of the water on the same summer evening, and they fly towards lights.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Hexagenia bilineata
- Group
- Other insects
- Family
- Ephemeridae
- Classification
- Insecta > Ephemeroptera > Ephemeridae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Fish fly
Where the facts come from
- Hexagenia bilineata (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by James George Needham. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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