Many Worlds Theory

One day in the summer of 2011, while mowing the lawn, I saw a strange creature flying through the air.

Actually, “flying” is too generous a term.  The creature was lilting through the air.  Lurching.  It appeared to have ten legs, and was about the size of a silver dollar.  I was puzzled, to say the least, but that lawn wasn’t going to mow itself so I went back to work.

The mystery bug…

I live in a rural area in the mountains of North Carolina, only 30 minutes away from the entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  There’s a lot of wildlife here: I’ve seen bear, elk, deer, raccoons, opossums, groundhogs, voles, and squirrels; our bird feeders are always full of cardinals, chickadees, towhees, finches, and titmice; and I once came home to a 4-foot black snake inside my house.  As for arthropods, I’m very familiar with flies, no-see-ums (family Ceratopogonidae), moths, wasps, honeybees, crickets, ants, beetles, and spiders of all kinds.  I’ve had close encounters with black widow spiders no less than 3 times in my life.

But this thing?  With 10 legs?  Lurching through the air like a drunken hang glider?  Incomprehensible.

Over the course of that summer, I saw such creatures on numerous occasions.  I gradually came to realize that they were insects, since subsequent sightings showed 6 legs, not 10.  My working hypothesis was that what I saw that first day was a mating pair: two of these things stuck together.  But I still had no idea what the confounded creatures were.

In appearance, the insects were bizarre to say the least.  They were striped, like zebras, and their legs appeared  to have at least 3 joints each, so that the legs took on a zigzag character.  They didn’t appear to use their wings, which I guessed were vestigial; rather, picture a 6-legged starfish up on one end, clawing and grasping its way forward.  As a physicist, it looked very much like the creatures were literally swimming through the air.  And so I resolved, with the help of the internet, to positively identify them.

Rutherford said that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting.”  A lot of people take this to be a disparaging comment about sciences other than physics, but I don’t.  I kind of like stamp collecting.  I like being meticulous, and being detailed.  That’s why I like pastimes such as putting together 1000-piece puzzles.

But my search for the identity of the “mystery bug” took stamp collecting to a whole new level.  It literally took me a month of sleuthing to identify the things.  I tried the obvious first: I googled things like “strange zebra striped bug” and “bug that swims in the air” but had no luck.  I posted a question on an entomology bulletin board.  I looked at websites dedicated to “insects of the Appalachians.”

Finally, I had a breakthrough: I saw one of the bugs hitting up against a window in our house.  For the first time, I could see the creature close up and for more than just a second or two.  I verified that the creature did have six legs; I verified that it did have wings, although they seemed useless.  I realized that my mystery bug was a crane fly.  Here’s a more typical, run-of-the-mill crane fly:

A typical crane fly

Regular crane flies are common where I live; kids often mistake them for gigantic mosquitoes (which they are not).

Once I realized that the mystery bug was a type of crane fly, my task was eased enormously.  And eventually I found this assortment of photographs.  Eureka!  I had done it!  They were phantom crane flies, of the family Ptychopteridae.  Specifically, they were the species Bittacomorpha clavipes, which, according to this Wikipedia article, are “known for the odd habit of spreading out [their] legs while flying, using expanded, trachea-rich tarsi to waft along on air currents.”

It turns out that the phantom crane fly is one of the very, very few creatures on Earth that fly without using their wings.  They are literally swimming, somehow taking advantage of a high Reynolds number (let’s say, 265?) to sludge through the atmosphere without those wings that evolution gave them.  Consequently they look more like seed pods drifting on the wind than they do insects.

What is my point?  I don’t have one.  I just think these bugs are cool, and you should try to find them if you ever visit the Eastern United States.  They hang out in marshy areas in late summer.  Oh, and if you’re a physicist or an entomologist, think about studying these little guys.  The field’s wide open as far as I can tell.  Somebody needs to video the flight of the phantom crane fly, so get on it!  [Note added later: I did find this video which shows the weird flight, are there more?]