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What is This?

So we spent one night at a hotel on the west side of Montreal. We pulled in around 11 PM or so. The hotel we quite well lit and as I was sitting the car underneath one the bright lights waiting for my husband to come back with our room key. (We were in Quebec and I don't speak French, so my husband had to do a lot of talking with people at restaurants and things like that.) I begin to notice a swarm of these bugs descending down upon our car. I have never seen bugs like these before. We took these pictures the next morning because the bugs were still there.
What is it?

Looking up that the underside through the windshield of our car.
Here is a whole swarm of them covering the side of the hotel. I am telling you there were a lot of them everywhere.

Comments

themapples said…
Mayflies! They spend most of their lives in streams as nymphs and hatch into adults. Alas, their airborne life is short, no more than a day, as their only purpose is to mate and lay their eggs back in the water. They don't even have mouth parts to eat! Their scientific order is "ephemeroptera", which you might recognize as sharing the same root as the word "ephemeral". It looks like you guys should have gone fishing with this good of a hatch--fish love 'em.

Hope you are doing well! Love your nerdy friend, Molly
June 29, 2009 at 8:21 PM
The Talens said…
Cool! Thanks for letting us know. It looks like we hit the area at just the right day. I hope that things are going well for you Molly. I would love to hear what you are up to these days.
June 29, 2009 at 11:56 PM
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