The Diptera, or True flies, are one of the most diverse groups of insects with over 160 000 species known to science (Evenhuis & Pape 2025). However, if you ask a person on the street how many flies there are they typically answer with “too many” and can usually name about five: house flies, blow flies, mosquitos, crane flies (usually wrongly assumed to be long-legged mosquitos) and horse flies.
People usually know these because they cause us annoyance, either by sitting on our food, on us, or by biting us while also sitting on us. So, flies are awful in every way. Except, they really aren’t.
Flies play many important roles in ecosystems, for example: they can be decomposers, pollinators, predators and parasites. Some of these roles bring them into contact with humans, but the vast majority of flies lead lives that rarely cause us any annoyance.
One such group of flies is Suragina Walker, 1859, a genus of Water Snipe flies (Athericidae). They are usually orange with long legs (Fig. 1), and much like horse flies (their closest relatives) can give quite painful bites. Knab in 1912 described the fly as “…a fierce biter and blood-sucker” with their bites “…exceedingly painful and caused more alarm among the horses in my outfit than any other fly”. These blood meals are essential for the egg production in females. But Suragina do more than bite. Their larvae are important aquatic predators of freshwater invertebrates, and are river-health indicator species, with their presence typically meaning that a water system is healthy.
Suragina occurs almost everywhere, yet if you ask a passer-by they would be entirely oblivious to the existence of these charming (at least to me!) goggas. In Sub-Saharan Africa we have 19 species of Water Snipe flies, all restricted to woodlands or forests.
We have recently revised the Suragina of the Afrotropical Region, describing eight new species (Muller et al. 2024). These are mostly not recent discoveries, with some having sat unrecognized in various museum collections since 1945. The nature of taxonomy and the lack of taxonomists mean that some groups go decades without anyone working on them. We have, however, described the strangest species of Suragina to date, Suragina bilobata Muller, 2024 with bizarre C-shaped antennae (Fig. 2), known only from Madagascar with material collected “recently” in 2002.
Interestingly, the very first specimen of Water Snipe flies ever to be collected and described from the entire Africa comes from Bloemfontein of all places. It was procured by a German pharmacist and amateur entomologist C. Tollin, who travelled to and around the Cape Colony in mid-1800s, and was in Bloemfontein at least in 1862 (Tollin 1862). While we cannot pinpoint the exact locality, the “embryonic” Bloemfontein consisted of just a handful of buildings along the Bloemspruit and had no shortage of other watercourses in those early years of its existence (Auret 2016). The marvel was immediately and promptly described as Atherix longipes by a famous German entomologist Friedrich Hermann Loew in 1863. (It had to subsequently be renamed as Suragina binominata (Bequaert, 1921) due to the name longipes being used for a North American species described in 1861.)
Only three species of Suragina are known from South Africa: Suragina agramma (Bezzi, 1926), Suragina binominata and Suragina monogramma (Bezzi, 1926) (Fig. 1). However, much is still unknown about South African Water Snipe flies. Thousands of records of larvae in streams and rivers exist thanks to environmental impact assessments of recent years, yet we have comparatively few records of adults. There is a large gap in our knowledge with regards to the genus’ distribution and potential diversity in not just South Africa, but Africa as a whole (Fig. 3), with the white dots depicting historic records, and the black ones showing the new data gained from our revision. The genus is most diverse in the tropical and subtropical areas, with some species, such as Suragina binominata also inhabiting Acacia woodland pockets in grassland biomes, like those found in the Free State and North West provinces.
Suragina, like all Water Snipe flies, are only adults for a fraction of their lives, spending the majority (a year or more) of their lifespan as larvae in streams and rivers. So one needs to be at the right place at the right time—and not necessarily be a pharmacist—to make an exciting discovery. Case in point: in 2022, while on holiday in Mpumalanga, I collected a specimen of Suragina binominata on a window—for the first time in over 20 years—inside a pharmacy(!), all because my daughter needed allergy medicine. Lucky.
While the initial revision of Suragina has yielded new species and records, our work is far from finished. Much is left to be explored and recorded, and in many countries the natural heritage is being destroyed faster than we can describe the diversity. This is why museum collections are critical for understanding our planet’s biodiversity. They help us comprehend what we have, and sadly what we’ve lost along the way.
Figure captions
References
Auret, H. 2016. Bloemfontein (1848-2015), mapping eight moments in time: Measuring and appreciating that which is nearest. New Contree 76: 193-212. https://doi.org/10.4102/nc.v76i0.137
Evenhuis, N.L. & Pape, T. (Eds). 2025. Systema dipterorum. Ver. 6. http://diptera.org (accessed on 03/03/2025)
Knab, F. 1912. Blood-sucking and supposedly blood-sucking Leptidae. Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington 14: 108-110. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2585753#page/128
Loew, H. 1863. Enumeratio dipterorum, quae C. Tollin ex Africâ meridionali (Orangestaat, Bloemfontein) misit. Wiener entomologische Monatsschrift 7: 9-16. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/WEMS_7_0009-0016.pdf
Muller, B.S., Swart, V.R. & Snyman, L.P. 2024. Revision of Afrotropical Suragina Walker, 1859 (Diptera, Athericidae). African Invertebrates 65(2): 247-327. https://doi.org/10.3897/afrinvertebr.65.140524
Tollin, C. 1862. Zur Naturgeschichte der Termiten. Entomologische Zeitung Stettin 23(4-6): 215-218. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/35847#page/223
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