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Hi


I cuaght a fly yesterday that apparently had not any signals of acari (perhaps hidden below calypters)... but today when I opened the fly was dead and with dozens and dozens of acari! It seems to be Varroa sp. ??? This seems to be no plausible. Varroa sp. attacks bees, not the flies. I might be wrong about id acari... but it seems really perfectly like a Varroa sp. Anyone reported any time parasitism (parasitoid acari) among acari against flies?

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Any pictures, Jorge?

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tomorrow I will show some photos.

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sorry for the delay, Tony.

Here comes the photos. :)

the fly seems to be Lonchaeid...

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and the mites...

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1. Seems your fly is a female of Fannia. Am I right?
2. If you havn't wings and if you like live in dung, how can you travel from old and dry dung to new and testy one? You have to use PterygotaAirlines to travel!

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loool :) eheh

hmm... it is quite possible to be Fannia sp.! Is it common to be very dark like coal? AND this is really much more bristly than a normal lonchaeid. :)

the problem is other... the mite seems had attacked and killed the fly. :S When I caught this fly I didn?t see any mites... (it doesn?t seem an acari..) and this fly was totally closed inside a vial. Then a few hours passed, I opened again the vial... and there were dozens of them! :|

They seem to have hatched from abdomen.

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Hi Jorge. Thanks for posting the pictures. The mites are almost certainly Macrochelidae. They are very common micropredators on dung and compost heaps, and regularly hitch a ride on staphylinids, muscids and other larger insects that visit. Here is a photo of a Stomoxys with a load under its abdomen - I suspect your fly was carrying them like this.
http://www.icb.us...musc14.jpg

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that's it!! but the difference is that mites killed the fly. They ate the abdomen of the fly. :S

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i must mention that these mites has about 1 mm or less. ;)