It's Thursday and yet here I am doing a WTF Wednesday. I'm four weeks into showering outside in the dark so trust me, the old rules no longer apply! I won't be asking WTF this critter is. Like, I said, the old rules are gone. I'm going to tell you what it is straight off the bat and I'm sure, if you're anything like me, once you see the photos, you'll be WTFing anyway.
I've got these little raised garden beds on wheels so I can chase the sun around our very shaded yard. So far they're working pretty great for growing little veggies and herbs and keeping the possums away. I don't use pesticides so let's just say I'm 'sharing' the bounty with anything else that gets to the crop before me. I spent the other morning carefully turning over leaves just seeing who had moved in and who was munching away on the leaves. And then who was munching on those munchers. I found a couple of these little wriggly larvae, small but fat and surprisingly transparent. I had zero idea as to what this critter was, never having seen one in the flesh or online and had to ask people way smarter than me. Turns out it's the larvae of a Hoverfly. I see Hoverflies all the time and have never given their lifecycle a second thought. Turns out these guys are one of the 'good guys' and I watched it blindly slapping its head down on various spots of the leaf before scooping up an aphid, something dark (its jaw? oesophagus? brain? mouth?) moving rhythmically back and forth inside its body as it ate.
My eyes are pretty crap at the best of times now but one of the reasons that I adore macro photography is that you just see so many details that you wouldn't be aware of otherwise. Now I knew this little Hoverfly larvae was transparent and I knew I could see some 'stuff' inside but it wasn't until I uploaded the photos that I realised that you can see all of the larvae's organs. WTF indeed!
Hoverfly Larvae
Northern Illawarra
