Australian garden insects with Denis Crawford
Scorpionflies and hangingflies have intriguing names. What is a scorpionfly? Does it have anything to do with scorpions? These fascinating insects belong to the order Mecoptera. It’s a small order of insects – only about 600 species. Learn more about these amazing and unusual insects in this video. It’s worth watching just to see the mating behaviour of hanging flies! In the video I refer to my Bug Basics video on insect life cycles. You can view that here: LINK
Only a tiny minority of insects are pests. The Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems would collapse without insects. That means insects are pretty important – so how can you attract them into your garden?
This video is an edited version of a webinar I gave for Sustainable Gardening Australia (https://www.sgaonline.org.au/) last week on the importance of insects in gardens.
There are many species of flies across several families that are associated with fungi. In the video I talk about a few of them, but these fighting flies steal the show!
The males of the species (Tapeigaster sp.) are noted for perching on the top of various fungi – including common ones like field mushrooms. On small fungi there is usually only one male per fungal cap, and he tries to defend it from competing males. The aim is to mate with a female that is attracted to the fungus. She wants to lay her eggs in the gills of the fungus so the hatching larvae can feed on the fungus.
Check out the video to see what happens!