Update: Pics as promised:
Thanks to the Boston Mycological Club‘s bulletin, I learned the name of the fungus that has been parasitizing the flies in my yard.
Chickens (and ducks) are really wonderful creatures. They add so much life to a largely dead city yard! With the addition of my chickens and ducks came the addition of a lot more organic matter from their straw and waste. This in turn lead to a (very temporary) increase in the fly population.
To balance this increase in flies, an increase in spiders and, it turns out, fungi stepped in! After a few weeks, the fly population went back down to normal but a WEIRD thing started happening.
On various plants in and around my garden adjacent to the coop, I started noticing flies that were ATTACHED to the tops of stems and leaves. This was not a property of the plant – it happened on a variety of plants. This was not a property of the type of fly – there were a variety of flies. I pulled one of the flies off and noticed that it was attached by white fibers. No stranger to the fungal realm, I knew this must be mycelium. But how curious!
Months later an issue of the Boston Mycological Club’s bulletin arrives in my mailbox. In it is an article describing the fly parasitizing Entomophthora muscae. The spores of this fungus fall onto an uninfected fly. The fly ingests the spores and within hours, the fungus spreads through the fly’s body and takes over its brain.
In the evening hours, critically ill insects tend to crawl up verticle surfaces to die at an elevated position. Approximately 3 hours after death the condiophores begin to emerge from the intersegmental membranes to initiate the conidial shower.
