I’ve had to deal with huge swarms of these things every summer for the few years I’ve lived a mile away from a lake. I assumed they were mosquitoes until recently.
Is it some kind of midge fly? How can you tell? If I were to make an uneducated guess, I’d say it’s not a mosquito because there’s not a straight proboscis.
BTW, you don’t need a lake to breed them. Any standing water will do. Rainwater barrels, cow troughs, ditches…
If you got mosquito problems then I feel bad for you son. I got 99 problems but a ditch ain’t one.
My only mosquito problem is the noise they are making when they hit the electrical fly squatter.
I activate it when getting ready for bed, and when I turn off the lights, it only takes a few seconds before the fireworks starts. No hits so far this year.
In fact they don’t like lakes. Too much movement and predator.
Scale would be helpful, but likely not a mosquito. Unless you have some decent macro setting or lens for your camera.
Mosquitoes have a slender, segmented body, one pair of wings, three pairs of long hair-like legs, and a specialized, highly elongated, proboscis, adapted for piercing and sucking.
Don’t see that on the picture!
No, the feathery antennae is a way to tell males and females apart, not species. Male mosquitoes have feathery antennae, and so do males of many other fly and even other insect species.
Here in Toronto area it is easy to tell the genders. Male mosquitoes are about 10 times the size of the females. Big honking things that look terrifying but do not harm. Are the squitos different gender sizes in different other areas?
So I’d consider myself a very amateur entomologist so am very open to being wrong here, but that’s not a thing to my knowledge; if anything, the males tend to be smaller. You might be seeing two different species, or are misidentifying another insect for a male mosquito.
I could be wrong. I have seen them for 60 yrs and anyone who sees them also calls them male mosquitoes. Now I am going to check it out and see. It’s summer now and there will be a few of them flying around that I can snap a pic of and see.
I searched and got this for male mosquito. This looks exactly like what I am talking about. They are way bigger and have no long proboscis for drinking.
That’s a crane fly. They have lots of nicknames and folk identities so it’s super common to call them something else. I’ve heard them called “mosquito hawks” (they don’t hunt mosquitoes) but male mosquitoes is a new one to me. You could add it to the Wikipedia page lol
Crane flies don’t have those feather like antennae. As another poster commented, this looks like a midge
Crane flies are significantly larger than mosquitoes and don’t swarm. Swarms near a lake are very typical of midges who look superficially like mosquitoes.
I’m not sure what it is exactly. It doesn’t look like a mosquito. I’d suggest uploading it on inaturalist.org to get it identified.
