Unusual horsefly

[William H.]

My brother gave me a call and said his son had caught a horsefly and wanted to know if I'd like to stop over and take some photos of it. He also mentioned having a praying mantis, I wasn't interested in the horsefly but I did want to photograph the mantis. When I got there I found out the mantis was already gone and the horsefly didn't look like much, mostly brown. But the striped eyes looked good so we started taking a few shots of it.

Up close the eyes looked even better.

At first we tried to shoot it in a jar, but it was moving around too much, so we put in the freezer for a few minutes and shot him when he was still too cold to move much.

 

[bug_girl]

the striped eyes are actually not that unusual--most horse and deer flies look like that, particularly in good lighting. It's just that people tend to not look that closely at a big biting fly before swatting

very nice pictures! The mouthparts are scary, aren't they?
they basically have a sort of serrated knife that they slash your skin with, and then a more standard part to the fly mouth that sponges up the blood.
yum!

 

[Goshawk]

Okay, so, why does its eyes look like that? What physical structure is responsible for the striping, or is it just an iridescence due to the angle?

 

[William H.]

the striped eyes are actually not that unusual--most horse and deer flies look like that, particularly in good lighting. It's just that people tend to not look that closely at a big biting fly before swatting

very nice pictures! The mouthparts are scary, aren't they?
they basically have a sort of serrated knife that they slash your skin with, and then a more standard part to the fly mouth that sponges up the blood.
yum!

I was going to ask you about the mouth parts, thanks for the info.

 

[William H.]

Okay, so, why does its eyes look like that? What physical structure is responsible for the striping, or is it just an iridescence due to the angle?

I don't know why they look like that, but I can tell you that the stripes stay in the same place and the color is about the same from different angles, so it's not just iridescence.

I did a Google image search on horseflies and found a few more interesting photos of differently striped and colored eyes:

fly photos

 

[Badger]

The stripes fade away after they die.

 

[Rolfe]

William, please tell me about your camera. Do you have a very special lens? I'm enormously impressed by the detail and clarity of these pictures.

Rolfe.

 

[William H.]

William, please tell me about your camera. Do you have a very special lens? I'm enormously impressed by the detail and clarity of these pictures.

Rolfe.

The camera used to take the close-ups belongs to my brother and is a Sony DSC-F717, my camera is a Sony DSC-F505V, both have a similar macro lens but his photos turned out better than mine this time around. Both of these cameras take very impressive close-up shots.

You can read more about the camera here.

You're probably familiar with how these photos were manipulated, but for those who aren't, I'll give a brief description.
In the close-up shots, the actual photo when transferred to the computer was not the same as seen here. The image was three to four times the size of the computer screen, so you would have to pan up, down, left and right to see parts of it. So I crop out the best part of the photo and if it's still too large I'll scale it down to fit the screen.

The fourth photo above is actually cropped from the second one, I then cleaned up some of the dirt/dust from the eyes in MS Paint. The second photo has also been cropped, there was a lot of unnecessary background that I got rid of. So the photos that you see here are not what was seen through the view finder of the camera.