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[–] 49 points 4 months ago (17 children)

The larval stages are predators or parasitoids of the eggs and larvae of other insects. The adult females usually deposit eggs in the vicinity of possible hosts, quite often in the burrows of beetles, wasps, or solitary bees.

Larvae live parasitically in the nests of various solitary bees and wasps.[2] When the fly larva locates a host larva, it will consume it slowly, greatly increasing in size as it tightly holds onto the host, eventually becoming a pupa and overwintering.[9]

haha yeah, adorable

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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I mean we consider human babies adorable, and they can grow up do some pretty horrid things. Also cats.

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I guess if human babies attached and ate a host slowly before getting huge we wouldn't think of them as adorable. These flies are us in reverse, they start horrible then grow into teddy bears of the sky

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (3 children)

    robber fly, its basically the fly version of dragonfly, they love to intercept mosquitos and other fly prey. there is a quite a few parasitoid flies, that attacks different insect hosts. the strangest ones are BAT FLies, which has no wings and are mostly blind.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Why would bat flies have no wings? Bats famously have wings!

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    bat flies, have evolved to cling to bat fur, they look like freaky spiders. apparently they are considered parasites on bats.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Oh, that's fair. I just vaguely assumed they were called bat flies because someone once upon a time thought they looked kinda like the fly version of some sorts of bats, but obviously didn't bother looking into that.

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