Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

Last summer we were visiting my oldest son in a nearby town, and there I found a weird fly on a bush. This is called a small-headed fly for very obvious reasons. I've never seen one, so it came home with us for pictures and that turned out to be super easy since it would scarcely move. The particular species is Pterodontia flavipes. For scale, it’s about the size of a kidney bean.
Small-headed fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

Flies in this family (Acroceridae), are not common. You can see a distinct tooth on the wing margin, and that identifies this as a male. I don't know what the tooth is for. The compound eyes in both sexes are holoptic – meaning they are joined together.
Small-headed fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Small-headed fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

Their life cycle is of some note in that they are parasitic on spiders. Eggs are scattered in large numbers, and the active larvae must find a suitable spider host and penetrate it.
I put this into BugGuide since they had no records of it in Michigan.

Thanks for looking!
Small-headed fly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

kpmac Loc: Ragley, La

Great set. Looks kinda like a bee imitator.

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

Thank you. It is described as a bee mimic.

tinusbum Loc: east texas

cool fly,i have seen a big headed fly

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

I was going to mention. Besides the flies with really small heads, there are others with really big heads!

bcheary Loc: Jacksonville, FL

Interesting set. Looks almost like a bee!

docshark Loc: Millersville, PA

One I've never seen or read about Mark. Very interesting and excellent shots of this unique specimen.
>i< Doc

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

Yes, as doc said... UNIQUE... "Sui generis" is a Latin expression that translates to “of its own kind.”

docshark Loc: Millersville, PA

randave2001 Loc: Richmond

Pretty awesome images. Very interesting critter.

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

Beautiful set Mark. Macro continues to introduce us to things we would see otherwise

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

Super shots, mark. What macro setup did you use - perhaps an MPE-65?

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

Thanks everyone!


The camera was the Canon t5i body (a crop sensor), and for the lower mag shots I used the Canon 100mm f/2.8 L lens with a Raynox diopter lens to boost the mag.
For the last shot of the face, I switched to the Venus/Laowa f/2.8 2.5x-5x lens. This is a fully manual lens that is probably the most comparable one out there to the legendary MPE-65mm, but at about 1/2 the price.
The pictures are short manual focus stacks done by nudging the camera forward for 4-6 frames. During nudging, the camera would be resting on a stack of slick magazines or it would be resting on my left fist. Depending on what works best.
Zerene stacker to stack the images.
Topaz sharpen AI , then ...
Gimp for final processing. That included using layer masks and cloning brushes to clean up artifacts caused by stacking and caused by sharpening (the sharpen AI program will try to sharpen even areas that are well out of focus, and those need to be blurred out again). I'm learning just now that to avoid that one could tell the Topaz sharpen program to work only in certain areas, and to avoid others.
One could go on.

topcat Loc: Alameda, CA

Excellent work

EnglishBrenda Loc: Kent, England

There is so much to learn from your write-ups and skillfully made images so thank you.