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The Smallest Fly in the World

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Courtesy of Toronto Star

This is theEuryplatea Nanaknihali. It is a new species of phorid flies. Looks like your average sized insect, right? Actually, this is the smallest fly in the world, measuring up to 0.4 millimetres in length. That’s about the size of a fleck of pepper or a grain of salt! However, this is also a pretty disgusting parasite. Turns out, the adult flies lay their eggs inside the head of an ant and the baby flies then eat their way out of the ant when they’ve matured. Not so average anymore, eh?

A Toronto man named Brian Brown, who is an entomologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County,discovered this fly during histhree-year project, in which he had to study all the different types of insects in Thailand’s national parks. Brown discovered it in the Kaeng Krachan National Park.His findings were recently published by the Entomological Society of America.

Just as a clarification, this is not the smallest insect in the world. That title goes out to the fairy flies, which are a type of wasps. Furthermore, the Euryplatea Nanaknihaliis related to another species in Equatorial Guinea. Moreover, flies make up about 10% of all the different kinds of animals in the world, with about160,000 species of flies discovered so far.

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