EBENEZERBreaking
The Marches, Shropshire : For this hoverfly, pretending to be far more dangerous than it actually is has been a useful evolutionary technique
Read full story on The Guardian →
Environment — Paul Evans
Back in the analogue world – where “analogue” means signals transmitted by continuous waves of sound or light, but also means something that looks like something else – intelligence is more poetic and weirder than its shambling digital doppelganger.
In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly , Volucella zonaria , is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.
On close inspection, the hornet mimic hoverfly is not a convincing hornet, but still, it’s first impressions that count for would-be predators. This kind of mimicry is called Batesian, where harmless species transmit the warning signals of harmful species. If their larvae can live as commensals, feeding safely in wasp and even hornet nests – called Mullerian mimicry – they must have something more than an inexact visual similarity to their hosts.
These hoverflies arrived in Britain in the 1940s, expanding their range rapidly by migrations from Europe, pushed on by increasingly hot summers. But as their range covers Europe, west and central Asia and Russia, the question then becomes: are they mimics of the European hornet , Vespa crabro , or the Oriental hornet , Vespa orientalis, from southern and eastern Europe, or even the yellow-legged Asian hornet , Vespa velutina, all of which are now in Britain?
Researchers such as Róbert Bohát are interested in the link between human cognition and animal mimicry as metaphors for survival. A hoverfly that is non-aggressive and herbivorous becomes a hornet that is an aggressive predator through the transmission of signals – mimicry as a bio-metaphor. Metaphor, stating what something is by describing what it is not, is so much part of our language that the poetic metaphor has its own meaning.
The hoverfly stays still on the leaf in bright sunshine, protected by identity theft, before buzzing off into a poetry of its own existence. In the analogue world, intelligence is art, not artifice.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly , Volucella zonaria , is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Paul Evans. Published 27 Aug 2026, 04:30 am.
Most relevant
Exclusive: utility company wants to draw off tens of millions of litres of water a day from Thames and replace it with treated effluent
Read on The Guardian →
