Bugs have Little Bugs Upon Their Backs to Bite 'em

This amazing fruit fly evolved to have pictures of ants on its wings

This is unbelievable, but the fruit fly G tridens has somehow evolved to have what looks like pictures of ants on its wings. Seriously, its transparent wings have an ant design on them complete with "six legs, two antennae, a head, thorax and tapered abdomen." It's nature's evolutionary art painted on a fly's wings.

Recently spotted by the New York Times, the fruit fly is just incredible. Other flies in its family of 5,000 species have other type of markings on its wings but it's the G tridens that has something so intricate and so specific.

The idea of the ant design, as explained to The National by Dr Brigitte Howarth of Zayed University who first discovered G tridens in the UAE, is that these flies use their wings to ward off predators. The fly flashes it wings back and forth to make it seem as if the ants are moving around and that movement would confuse the predator. Nature's version of a tattoo, I guess.

Over at Althouse, where I found the original post, she wandered off to  to this blog post, casting doubt on the whole affair:

Returning to the viral ant-winged photo, it would appear that the fly is supinating its wings (twisting the wing 90o and pressing forwards to display patterns), which can occur both when a species is pretending they’re a threatening spider as well as in species with courtship wing displays, which doesn’t help us decide what’s going on — is there a female just off camera that’s being courted, or is the fly threatened by the giant camera lens in its face? However, if you look closely at the photo you can see that the middle and hind legs are actually curled up under the body and the fore legs are not resting in a natural position at all — they look more like a ballerina en pointe, with the last leg segments curled and with the tops of the “feet” (the tarsomeres) resting on the surface of the substrate — which leads me to believe the fly in the photo may be dead, or at least heavily compromised, and not actively displaying its wings at all!

Putting everything together, it leads me to believe we may be choosing to see ants where they don’t actually exist. Much like how we see sharks in the clouds or Jesus in our toast (a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia), I think we’ve become so conditioned to expect ornate patterns on wings to be mimicking something else that we’re forcing objects to appear everywhere, even if there’s no evolutionary or behavioural explanation for it. It’s important that we don’t let our human-centric points of view, emotions and opinions bias our interpretation of what’s really going on. The fact that there are so many amazing and believable mimicry strategies in the world of insects is awe-inspiring, but rather than trying to fit them all in to the same box, we should instead be working to understand what crazy new idea natural selection is experimenting with now.

Evolution doesn't ask questions; it only supports things that work. It doesn't ask if they look like ants or jumpings spiders.  As long as they deter predators, it will tend to propagate in the population, and become more effective.

Furthermore, the patterns on the wings can serve two purposes, or even more, for example both as for use in courtship and identification of species among similar fruit fly species and as predation deterrence.  Nature is full of structures and behaviors that apparently serve multiple functions.  Are human hairs (on heads) for sexual determination or for warmth?  Fish have fins to swim, and look good for courtship. On and on.