Svelte Killer - _TNY_2785
This slender beauty is a male stripe-legged robber fly (Dioctria hyalipennis).
Just like the other robber flies, they are predators, catching their prey mid-air and punching that rostrum (the cylindrical mouth part below the eyes) into their victim and injecting a venom which both kill and dissolves them into a presumably tasty bug-shake.
A little after finding this one, I stumbled on a female D. hyalipennis which had caught a parasitic wasp and managed a shot of it here: www.flickr.com/photos/tinyturtle/51347403592/
Svelte Killer - _TNY_2785
This slender beauty is a male stripe-legged robber fly (Dioctria hyalipennis).
Just like the other robber flies, they are predators, catching their prey mid-air and punching that rostrum (the cylindrical mouth part below the eyes) into their victim and injecting a venom which both kill and dissolves them into a presumably tasty bug-shake.
A little after finding this one, I stumbled on a female D. hyalipennis which had caught a parasitic wasp and managed a shot of it here: www.flickr.com/photos/tinyturtle/51347403592/