Mayflies (also up-winged flies or up-wing flies, or drake-flies in the UK; shadflies or fishflies in northern U.S. and Canada) 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 have 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 and highly oxygenated aquatic environment. They are unique among insect orders in having a fully winged terrestrial preadult 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 them. 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 antiquity. 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".
Description
Nymph
Immature mayflies are aquatic and are referred to as nymphs or naiads. In contrast to their short lives as adults, they may live for several years in the water. They have an elongated, cylindrical or somewhat flattened body that passes through a number of instars (stages), moulting and increasing in size each time. When ready to emerge from the water, nymphs vary in length, depending on species, from 3 to 30 mm (0.12 to 1.18 in). The head has a tough outer covering of sclerotin, often with various hard ridges and projections; it points either forwards or downwards, with the mouth at the front. There are two large compound eyes, three ocelli (simple eyes) and a pair of antennae of variable lengths, set between or in front of the eyes. The mouthparts are designed for chewing and consist of a flap-like labrum, a pair of strong mandibles, a pair of maxillae, a membranous hypopharynx and a labium. The thorax consists of three segments – the hindmost two, the mesothorax and metathorax, being fused. Each segment bears a pair of legs which usually terminate in a single claw. The legs are robust and often clad in bristles, hairs or spines. Wing pads develop on the mesothorax, and in some species, hindwing pads develop on the metathorax. The abdomen consists of ten segments, some of which may be obscured by a large pair of operculate gills, a thoracic shield (expanded part of the prothorax) or the developing wing pads. In most taxa up to seven pairs of gills arise from the top or sides of the abdomen, but in some species they are under the abdomen, and in a very few species the gills are instead located on the coxae of the legs, or the bases of the maxillae. The abdomen terminates in slender thread-like projections, consisting of a pair of cerci, with or without a third central caudal filament.
Subimago
The final moult of the nymph is not to the full adult form, but to a winged stage called a subimago that physically resembles the adult, but which is usually sexually immature and duller in colour. The subimago, or dun, often has partially cloudy wings fringed with minute hairs known as microtrichia; its eyes, legs and genitalia are not fully developed. Females of some mayflies (subfamily Palingeniinae) do not moult from a subimago state into an adult stage and are sexually mature while appearing like a subimago with microtrichia on the wing membrane. Oligoneuriine mayflies form another exception in retaining microtrichia on their wings but not on their bodies. Subimagos are generally poor fliers, have shorter appendages, and typically lack the colour patterns used to attract mates. In males of Ephoron leukon, the subimagos have forelegs that are short and compressed, with accordion like folds, and expands to more than double its length after moulting. After a period, usually lasting one or two days but in some species only a few minutes, the subimago moults to the full adult form, making mayflies the only insects where a winged form undergoes a further moult.
Imago
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