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Photo#66437
Nature At It's Finest

Nature At It's Finest
Hancock C & O Canal, Washington County, Maryland, USA
July 17, 2006
Can anyone identify the flies and beetles feeding on this frog?

...
The green flies are Calliphorids, the orange and black beetle is a Silphid.
e.g.
I am not sure what the big thing with the yellowish pronotum on the upper middle part of the frog is.

 
Nicrophorus
The black and orage silphid is a Nicrophorus tomentosus.

 
The large black and yellow in
The large black and yellow insect on top of the frog is another silphid, Necrophila americana:

 
...
I guesss they are Silphids too.
e.g.

 
Thanks for the info
There seems to be two species of flies there. Ones that are bright green and ones that are a darker green. Even the wings of these flies lay differently. Thanks for the info!

 
Types of flies
The yellow-green flies look like genus Lucilia, a very common "garbage can" fly, whose larvae can climb up any surface because they lay down a slime trail. I tried rearing them as food for mantids once, and when the larvae were ready to pupate, they could escape out of their rearing trays over any dry, vertical fuzzy barrier. They could even crawl along the bottom of horizontal dry fuzzy barriers. So I gave up on them because they would mostly all escape (This ability probably explains how they do so well in garbage cans---they get out and pupate before the cans get dumped in the garbage truck), and went to the second common species in the picture, genus Phormia. These are the bluish ones with their wings folded and the red-brown eyes. These can not escape over dry fuzzy barriers out of their rearing trays and turned out to be very satisfactory for rearing in quantity as food for my mantid colony. Vincent Dethier wrote a small, very amusing and informative book, To Know a Fly, on Phormia regina and the research he did on this species. Everybody interested in insects should read it. See http://www.amazon.com/Know-Fly-Vincent-Gaston-Dethier/dp/0070165742. It is a classic.

 
At least
4 kinds: a green and a blue species of what I think are Calliphorids, a gold-bodied fly (look at the lone individual on the frog's "thigh") and a black and blue type (perhaps also a Calliphorid) at the the bottom of the image

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