Snow fly
The snow fly is a crane fly with no wings at all. It looks a bit like a small spider with long legs. It comes out in winter and walks across the snow in forests, when almost all other insects are hiding from the cold.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
It looks for the coldest place it can find and keeps walking on snow even below freezing.
Its blood has a kind of sugar in it that works like antifreeze and stops it from freezing.
If one of its legs starts to freeze, it can drop that leg off to save itself, a bit like a lizard drops its tail.
It has no flying muscles, so a female has more room inside her body to carry eggs, up to 200.
A grown-up snow fly can live for about two months, much longer than other crane flies.
Most asked questions about Snow fly
?Why does the snow fly have no wings?
Flying needs lots of energy, which is hard to make in freezing cold, so the snow fly walks instead.
?Where can you see a snow fly?
On the snow in forests and mountains in winter, slowly walking across the white surface.
?Does the snow fly eat?
The grown-ups do not eat. They only drink water from the snow.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Chionea
- Group
- Flies and mosquitoes
- Family
- Limoniidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Diptera > Limoniidae
- Lives on
- Europe, Asia, North America
- Also known as
- Snow crane fly
Where the facts come from
- Chionea (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Jyri Mäki-Jaakkola. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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