Years ago, I was up at Hoton Lake when I received an email message from my globetrotting friend MMCB from Viet Nam: Greetings from Ho Chi Minh City! That was the *first* time she visited Viet Nam… I looked around at my surroundings and couldn’t resist sending the pic below with the message: You may be in Ho Chi Minh City but *IIIII* am in Fish Fly City! 🙃

That was a long time ago and the fish flies in the pic were attached to the Little Princess trailer that we used to have. The Moldy Old cFam Cabin was still in existence then and I definitely did not use an iPhone to take this pic.

Anyway… We didn’t really see many fish flies when we arrived Friday night and there were only a few around the cabin when I left to take my walk Saturday morning. When I got a few cabins down, I saw this mailbox.

The fish flies got worse throughout the day and this morning they were EVERYWHERE! When we tried to load up the Ninja to leave for Megalopolis, a whole bunch of them got INTO the car, which was a fun start to the trip.

Just to clarify, these insects are absolutely harmless to people. They do not bite or sting. They are extremely fragile bugs that hatch, mate, and, die within 24 hours. (Disclaimer: I have not fact-checked this so it may be an “alternative fact”.) They freak out people who don’t like insects in general and are mildly annoying to anyone who has to clean their carcasses up or shoo them out of an automotive vee-hickle. If enough of them die on a road, I think it can become slippery but that may also be an alternative fact. Once, I was at Hoton Lake in MARCH and I decided I didn’t want to ski that day so I cleaned out the refrigerator. I found a (dead) fish fly in one of the veggie bins. It had been there since the last summer.

Below is what remains of the carcass of a fish fly that made it all the way to the Planet Ann Arbor (we don’t have them here) and into the Landfill by way of a grocery bag.

A final disclaimer: I usually call these insects “fish flies”. I do not know their Latin name. Some people call them “May flies”. That doesn’t work for me because at Hoton Lake they hatch in June. When I was a kid at the moominbeach (where they hatch in early July), I can remember my granddaddy calling them “Canadian Soldiers”.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 9th, 2019 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.