Mayfly

For other uses, see Mayfly (disambiguation).

Mayfly
Temporal range: Late Carboniferous–present[1]
Rhithrogena germanica, the fly fisherman's "March brown mayfly"
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Subclass: Pterygota
Division: Palaeoptera
Superorder: Ephemeropteroidea
Rohdendorf, 1968
Order: Ephemeroptera
Hyatt & Arms, 1890
Suborders and Families

See text

Mayflies (also known as shadflies or fishflies in Canada and the upper Midwestern United States, as Canadian soldiers in the American Great Lakes region,[2] and as up-winged flies in the United Kingdom) are aquatic insects belonging to the order Ephemeroptera. This order is part of an ancient group of insects termed the Palaeoptera, which also contains dragonflies and damselflies. Over 3,000 species of mayfly are known worldwide, grouped into over 400 genera in 42 families.

Mayflies have ancestral traits that were probably present in the first flying insects, such as long tails and wings that do not fold flat over the abdomen. Their immature stages are aquatic fresh water forms (called "naiads" or "nymphs"), whose presence indicates a clean, unpolluted and highly oxygenated aquatic environment. They are unique among insect orders in having a fully winged terrestrial preadult stage, the subimago, which moults into a sexually mature adult, the imago.

Mayflies "hatch" (emerge as adults) from spring to autumn, not necessarily in May, in enormous numbers. Some hatches attract tourists. Fly fishermen make use of mayfly hatches by choosing artificial fishing flies that resemble them. One of the most famous English mayflies is Rhithrogena germanica, the fisherman's "March brown mayfly".[3]

The brief lives of mayfly adults have been noted by naturalists and encyclopaedists since Aristotle and Pliny the Elder in classical antiquity. The German engraver Albrecht Dürer included a mayfly in his 1495 engraving The Holy Family with the Mayfly to suggest a link between heaven and earth. The English poet George Crabbe compared the brief life of a daily newspaper with that of a mayfly in the satirical poem "The Newspaper" (1785), both being known as "ephemera".

  1. ^ Hoell, H. V.; Doyen, J. T.; Purcell, A. H. (1998). Introduction to Insect Biology and Diversity (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 320, 345–348. ISBN 978-0-19-510033-4.
  2. ^ Galbincea, Barb (18 June 2014). "Canadian soldiers invade Rocky River (photo gallery)". cleveland.com. Retrieved 11 October 2022.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference McCully was invoked but never defined (see the help page).