This fly has ant 'bodyguards' on its wings

When Dr. Brigitte Howarth was studying an oleander shrub in northern Oman, UAE, she wasn’t expecting to find something impressive: a fruit fly that could be a strong contender for the “Most Remarkable Wing Design in the Insect Kingdom” award.

 

The Goniurellia tridens fruit fly seems to have taken camouflage to the next level: each of its wings bears an amazing image of an ant. G tridens belongs to the tephitidae family, one of 5,000 species of fruit flies that have colorful and detailed markings on their wings.

 

“"I was looking at the stem of the leaves and I noticed that there were some insects crawling around,” said Dr. Howarth, an ecologist from Zayed University who made the discovery July last year. “When I sort of honed in I started to notice what I thought was a couple of ants moving around." Dr. Howarth was able to take a closer look at the fly under a microscope and got a good view of the markings on its wings.

 

G tridens is native to the Near and Middle East, central Asia, and India.  The fly has bright green eyes and a greenish-grey body, allowing it to blend in almost seamlessly with its surroundings. Dr. Howarth believes that the intricate patterns on its wings have defensive as well as romantic purposes. "It's all about optimising your possibilities of survival. There's always variety and some individuals, for whatever reason, have more of a success because of that variation."

 

The fly received a sudden surge of attention after Twitter user Ziya Tong posted a photo of the insect, taken by Peter Roosenschoon:

 

 

It has since been passed around various social media platforms, and has even been featured on The New York Times’s Dot Earth blog. Online users initially thought that the markings on the fly’s wings resembled ants, but a few experts, including ecologist Mark Moffett, observed that the markings were in fact patterned after jumping spiders (saltacids). — TJD, GMA News