Fish Fly Season:

What's it all about?

In the summer of 1995, I worked a three month internship at The Warroad Pioneer, which I'm sorry to say has since ceased operation. This was the first professional newspaper that I worked for in my career, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience. I had only worked at Bemidji State University's newspaper for about a year and half before landing the internship. At The Pioneer I gained experience in sports, feature, beat and government reporting. I designed pages, took and developed photographs and was responsible for community relations. The best part is that I remain friends with the owners nearly 30 years later.

July 4, 1995

By Devlyn Brooks

They come and they are gone like a whisper in the night. They are harmless; most of them don't even have mouths; yet they can cause an entire town to turn out its lights.

They are the fishflies, and they converge on Warroad en masse for about two weeks every year.

They have established quite a legend in Warroad. Enough so, that every year during the fishfly season the town turns out its lights because the flies are attracted to them. In the morning, below a light that has been left on, there will be a pile of dead fishflies because they may live for as little as a few hours.

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources officer Jeff Birchem said that he umping a baseball game Monday, and he almost had to call the game on account of fishflies. He said it had gotten dark, which made him wonder whether or not to call the game because the stadium's lights would attract the fishflies. All the other lights in town were off.

"Fishflies" are actually called "mayflies": fishfly is just a local nickname. They belong to the ancient order of animals called Ephemeroptera, which were the first group of insects still existing to develop wings. There are about 2,000 species of mayfly.

The truth is that they aren't even flies because they have four wings; flies have only two.

As adults they do not feed, and they only live from a few hours to a few days as adults. So, it could be said that their lives revolve totally around reproduction; they live to breed.

That is what the commotion by lights is all about; they are mating.

A young mayfly hatches from an egg in water, such as rivers, streams and lakes. After hatching a young mayfly may live two months to a year in the water breathing through gills and feeding on water plants.

The young mayfly then sheds its skin and leaves the water as sort of a sub-adult. Mayflies happen to be the only insect to go through this stage in life.

After another few hours, the sub-adult will shed its skin and become a full-grown adult.

The aquatic nymph stage that the mayflies are born in are an important source of food for fish.

Bob Ekstrom, also of the DNR Wildlife office in Baudette, said that fishflies are a "sign of good water quality."

Birchem added that a few years ago when the Mississippi River started producing its first fishflies, there was a celebration because it was a sign that the river was starting to become clean.

He also said they are used to test herbicide and pesticide companies' claims about solubility. He said that they will test to see if the fishflies can still reproduce after herbicides and pesticides were supposed to be inert.

Ekstrom said that the type of mayfly that we currently are seeing are a type of burrowing mayfly, which are among the largest and most common.

Birchem said that fishflies are nothing to be concerned about, and they are actually very helpful.