Learn about freeloader flies, which dare share the dinner of spiders, mantids and other predatory insects much larger than themselves.

Read a short introduction about the family Milichiidae (Diptera, Schizophora) or visit the species pages (see Navigation) with information about and photos of common, beautiful and/or important species.

As part of the EDIT project, this website includes a revision of the genus Milichiella, as an example for a web revision. For more information on Diptera see The *new* Diptera Site. For a comprehensive catalog of Milichiidae see the Diptera portal.

New additions

• Check recent posts.
• First record of Desmometopa leptometopoides Sabrosky in the Nearctic Region
• Changed the settings so that attachments are only visible when users are logged in. This allows me to attach pdfs of papers to biblio records without infringing on copyright laws. Not copyrighted attachments are still available to anonymous users via links (Dec. 2011).
• Changed the Links content type so that it is linked to the associated taxa and to the citation keywords. So for example links to images and videos of Milichiidae will show on the honey bee species page (Sept. 2011).
• A new view for searching for images of specimens by country or museum (June 2011).
• Online publication: The Milichiidae from 'De Kaaistoep', The Netherlands (April 2011).
• All citations added and linked to the bibliography (March 2011)
• All data in the former custom 'Nomenclature & Description' content type have been moved to the 'ITIS name' and 'taxon description' content types that follow international standards. A table with all names is available and can be search in multiple ways. Several species pages are exported to EOL (February 2011)
• Countries maps for all species have been added (January 2011)
• Description of a new species, Stomosis arachnophila, on this website combined with publication in ZooKeys. Check out the species page, online publication, journal publication, description of the workflow and a blog on publishing Scratchpad data in ZooKeys (June 2010).

Navigation

A click on a term in the 'Classification' menu will open the the species page for this term. Click on the plus icon in front of a term to view the child taxa. You can also click on 'Taxonomy' above the search field, wait for the circle to appear in the right corner, enter a term (genus + species name) and search.