Bug Encyclopedia
Search and identify bugs & insects — beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, bees, spiders and more — with size, habitat, danger, behavior, and how to tell them apart.
Drain Fly
A tiny, fuzzy gray-tan fly with broad, moth-like wings held tent-fashion over its body, often seen resting motionless on bathroom walls near drains.
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Black Fly
A small, humpbacked black fly with clear wings that gathers in persistent swarms near flowing streams, favoring exposed skin around the head.
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Phorid Fly
A tiny, hump-backed fly best known for scuttling erratically across countertops and floors rather than taking flight, drawn to anything rotting or moist.
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Horse Fly
A stout, fast-flying fly with large iridescent eyes and a heavy, robust body, known for its persistent, buzzing pursuit of large mammals on warm summer days.
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Warble Fly
A furry, bee-mimicking fly that never lands on flowers or feeds as an adult, spending its brief life darting around grazing cattle to lay eggs on their legs and lower body. Herds sometimes react with sudden panicked runs, known as gadding, whenever a warble fly approaches.
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Bot Fly
A stocky, bumblebee-mimicking fly whose adults never feed and live only long enough to mate and locate a rodent or rabbit burrow for their eggs. Despite their harmless, buzzing adult stage, bot flies are best known through the larvae that develop as internal parasites of small mammals.
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Marsh Fly
A slender, unassuming fly best known for larvae with a remarkable diet: nearly every species in the family feeds on aquatic or terrestrial snails and slugs, making marsh flies natural specialists in wetland food webs. Adults are often found resting quietly on sedges and other marsh vegetation near the water's edge.
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Gnat
A catch-all common name for a wide range of tiny, delicate flies, some no bigger than a grain of pepper, often seen hovering in small clouds near water, moist soil, or overripe produce.
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Black Fly Larva
Anchored to submerged rocks in fast-flowing streams by a silken thread, the black fly larva bends into the current and combs the water for drifting particles with a pair of delicate, fan-shaped feeding brushes.
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Fruit Fly (Mediterranean)
A small but strikingly patterned fly with mottled, banded wings held out to the sides in a fan and a body dotted with silvery spots, best known for larvae that tunnel through ripening fruit. Native to sub-Saharan Africa, it has spread with human trade to become one of the most widely recognized fruit-infesting insects in the world.
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Fungus Gnat
A small, dark, mosquito-like fly with long legs and delicate smoky wings, often seen weakly fluttering around houseplants or crawling across damp potting soil.
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Tussock Moth
A moth with a striking split lifestyle: winged, drab gray-brown males fly to seek out flightless, grub-like females, while the ornate caterpillars sport dense tufts of colorful bristly hair.
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Gall Midge
A delicate, mosquito-like fly whose larvae trigger plants to grow strange, often colorful swellings called galls, each species usually tied to one particular host plant.
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No-See-Um
A speck-sized fly so tiny it seems to vanish from sight, yet capable of swarming exposed skin near beaches and marshes at dawn and dusk.
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Hoverfly
A slender, bee- or wasp-patterned fly known for its remarkable ability to hover motionless in midair before darting suddenly to a new flower.
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Long-Legged Fly
A jewel-bright little fly that flashes metallic green, blue, or bronze in the sunlight as it darts across leaves on comically long, stilt-like legs, pausing to perform quick territorial displays. Both adults and larvae are active hunters of even smaller insects, making this tiny fly a useful predator in gardens and wetlands alike.
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Ichneumon Wasp
A slender, long-antennaed parasitoid wasp, often mistaken for a giant mosquito or a stinging insect, that is best known for the extraordinarily long ovipositor some species use to drill into wood and lay eggs on hidden larvae.
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Cicada
A stout, big-eyed insect best known for the loud, buzzing chorus of song produced by males, and for periodical species that emerge from the ground by the millions after living underground for over a decade.
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Biting Midge
A minuscule, gray-winged fly that gathers in dense swarms near wetlands and can slip through window screens unnoticed.
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Emperor Moth
A striking silk moth with a large eyespot on each of its four wings, showing pronounced differences between the smaller, orange-brown, day-flying males and the larger, greyer, night-flying females.
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Vaporer Moth
A tussock moth with dramatic sexual differences: the male is a small rusty-brown day-flying moth with a white wing spot, while the female is a flightless, wingless gray sac-like insect that never leaves her cocoon.
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Silver Y Moth
A fast-flying, day-active noctuid moth named for the metallic silver Y- or gamma-shaped mark on each mottled grey-brown forewing, famous for its long-distance migratory flights.
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Vapourer Moth
A small tussock moth with striking sexual dimorphism: rusty-orange, day-flying males with feathery antennae contrast with flightless, grub-like grey females that never leave their cocoon to lay eggs.
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Cinnabar Moth
A striking black-and-red day-flying moth whose boldly banded orange-and-black caterpillars feed conspicuously on ragwort, sequestering plant compounds as a chemical defense advertised by their vivid warning colors.
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