This lovely orange fly had us almost fooled. It had so many features of a bee-fly in the family Bombyliidae - the long legs, the proboscis, the wings; yet it had the bulbous abdomen, thorax, and setae of a tachinid. It was a clumsy flier - where the bee flies and the Tachinids are generally not. This fly plopped from flower to flower, the comical, wildly-elongated palps (the wheat-colored, pubescent structures jutting straight out of the face) only one of its outstandingly-odd features. The real proboscis is the black structure protruding straight downward into the flower, almost an afterthought, almost as if the fly was hiding its real activity. Now I beginning to wonder - why does that archetypal Tachinid, Archytas, not have this industrial-strength nectar-sucker-hose with the spoon-like gizmo on the end?

Few tachinids are known to be host-specific, although some species of the genus Phasiinae are limited to a few Hemiptera hosts. Many tachinids will attack insect hosts in 2 or more different orders. Many tachinids parasitize major agricultural pests of food or timber crops, and have potential for use as biological control agents, but most attempts at using them in such wise have been dismal failures.

Among the methods tachinids use to infect their subjects are the oviparous species that place large, macrotype eggs directly on the body of the host, the micro-oviparous, which place tiny, microtype eggs on foliage or other foodstuffs being consumed by the host, or the larviparous, which retain their eggs until maturity; these eggs hatch immediately upon being laid on or near the target. Some female tachinidae that attack bugs or beetles have piercing ovipositors much like wasps in the Hymenoptera family Ichneumonidae.

We are not sure what host our whale-tail fly infests. We hope someone will help out and tell us more about this spectacular insect.