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.
South Africans have always looked up to Lesotho, quite literally, as the entire landlocked country is on average 900 metres higher than South Africa (Midgley et al. 2023). The high altitude also means that Lesotho has more abundant alpine vegetation (in this case meaning vegetation above 2800 metres above sea level) and harbours a greater diversity of alpine-adapted species.
Tiger Flies (Fig. 1), scientifically called Coenosia are small inconspicuous grey flies. They belong to a family of flies called the Muscidae, generally referred to as “Houseflies” but they are not your stereotypical pesky housefly (Fig. 2) and are not likely to come into your house to irritate you like their cousins. You see, these little flies are actually fierce predators and typically hunt all kinds of insects.
Every year, thousands of insects visit our gardens. While some are purely pests (such as plant lice), and others are pollinators (such as honey bees); there is a group of insects that skirt the knife’s edge between being both pests and pollinators, with the added bonus of being pretty too: Butterflies (and sometimes moths).
The age- old joke of “What do you call a fly without wings? A walk!” is to most just a typical dad-joke. But what many people don’t realise is that flies (Insect order Diptera) have quite a few species that are indeed “walks”.