The date in the title of this post marks the sad passing of one of the Museum’s tiniest volunteers: in early February I discovered Beetah, my Carabus violaceous, lying still on her coconut substrate and to be honest, a little dried out.
OK, I have decided to create #WorldRobberFlyDay. All the time now, we hear that this large mammal or that large mammal has a ‘day’, and that got me thinking. Buglife have an Invertebrate of the Month, but even they are not very often the lesser-known insects, including the flies.
And I wanted global. Let the world celebrate! Why is it always the large stuff or the pretty (and, in my opinion, slightly less important) species? So I thought about it and decided it was about time that we championed more aggressively the rights of the small and endangered flies. These creatures are some of the most charismatic animals on the planet. The robberflies, or Asilidae, are truly worth celebrating for their looks, for their behaviour, for their good deeds to us, and because many of them are threatened.
Figure 1. Phylogenetic arrangement of Diptera showing the more advanced Brachycerans and the position of the Asilidae (robberflies) within it
The UK boasts 28 species of Asilidae (OK, so that’s not a lot in terms of flies, but hold on – we have only 30 native terrestrial mammals, of which 17 are bats and 2 are native marine mammals). Globally there are more than 7,500 species, and as such, it is one of the largest families of insects today. In fact Torsten Dikow, a world expert on this group, has them as the third most speciose group of diptera. This is a group, therefore, that has a large impact on the environment in which they live.
