Bengals hold off season activites
Missing in American Memorial
Prepping for the Indy 500
Home > Blogs > Birds and Butterflies > Archives > 2010 > January > 25 > Entry
Reflections of An Amateur Birder- Winter Stoneflies
Written By Lisa McGurk
The recent thaw in our temperatures brought up a discussion at the Nature Center about Winter Stoneflies. The rise of temperatures above the freezing mark sometimes brings the odd sight of insects flying around in winter. Winter Stoneflies are some that you might see when that happens. They are used as a measure of the cleanliness of streams. As Twin Creek is the second cleanest stream in Ohio, we have our fair share of Winter Stoneflies at Germantown MetroPark. You can link to a very interesting video on the efforts to keep Twin Creek clean on the Germantown Nature Center website: http://www.metroparks.org/Parks/Germantown/NatureCenter.aspx.
I found a brochure on Winter Stoneflies from Ohio Division of Wildlife and discovered that stoneflies are a very ancient order of insects. They have an incomplete life cycle that include the egg, nymph and adult stages. They do not undergo a pupal metamorphosis. Winter Stonefly nymphs leave the water during the winter and early spring and emerge from the water as adults. The next time I walk along a frozen streambed, I will keep an eye out for these long and thin flies.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Comments