Ephemeral Being

Mayflies (also known as Canadian soldiers in the United States, and as shadflies or fishflies in Canada and the upper Midwestern U.S.; also up-winged flies in the United Kingdom) are aquatic insects belonging to the order Ephemeroptera. This order is part of an ancient group of insects termed the Palaeoptera, which also contains dragonflies and damselflies. Over 3,000 species of mayfly are known worldwide, grouped into over 400 genera in 42 families.

Mayflies exhibit a number of ancestral traits that were probably present in the first flying insects, such as long tails and wings that do not fold flat over the abdomen. Their immature stages are aquatic fresh water forms (called "naiads" or "nymphs"), whose presence indicates a clean, unpolluted environment. They are unique among insect orders in having a fully winged terrestrial adult stage, the subimago, which moults into a sexually mature adult, the imago.

Mayflies "hatch" (emerge as adults) from spring to autumn, not necessarily in May, in enormous numbers. Some hatches attract tourists. Fly fishermen make use of mayfly hatches by choosing artificial fishing flies that resemble the species in question. One of the most famous English mayflies is Rhithrogena germanica, the fisherman's "March brown mayfly".

The brief lives of mayfly adults have been noted by naturalists and encyclopaedists since Aristotle and Pliny the Elder in classical times. The German engraver Albrecht Dürer included a mayfly in his 1495 engraving The Holy Family with the Mayfly to suggest a link between heaven and earth. The English poet George Crabbe compared the brief life of a daily newspaper with that of a mayfly in the satirical poem "The Newspaper" (1785), both being known as "ephemera".







The lifespan of an adult mayfly is very short, varying with the species. The primary function of the adult is reproduction; adults do not feed, and have only vestigial (unusable) mouthparts, while their digestive systems are filled with air. Dolania americana has the shortest adult lifespan of any mayfly: the adult females of the species live for less than five minutes. Adult mayflies tend to be herbivorous only really surviving on algae although there are a number of known mayfly species that prey on other insects. The adult mayfly has a very short lifespan which can be anywhere from to half an hour to a few weeks long. The adult mayflies have a number of predators out of the water including amphibians such as frogs, toads and newts, small reptiles, birds and even rodents and mammals. However, the aquatic longer-lived mayfly nymphs too have predators including fish and amphibians.

The female mayfly can lays thousands of eggs at a time which she does so into the water. The mayfly nymph are aquatic and hatch in the water where they can take anywhere from a few months to more than a year to transform into an adult mayfly and head into the air.

https://canva.me/6srbGlpf81