{"id":7906,"date":"2012-03-29T11:29:16","date_gmt":"2012-03-29T16:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=7906"},"modified":"2012-03-29T11:29:16","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T16:29:16","slug":"whats-with-all-the-crane-flies-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/03\/29\/whats-with-all-the-crane-flies-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s With All the Crane Flies This Year?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Nathan Bernier\/KUT News<\/p>

Monica Malone, general manager at J&J Pest Control, holds a sticky strip covered in dead crane flies.<\/p><\/div>\n

You’ve probably seen them hovering at your windows or waiting at your door. A few may have even flown into your house. They look like giant mosquitoes, and they appear to be everywhere this season. Say hello to the Crane Fly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As Texas A&M University points out on its site devoted to the fly, “large numbers of adult crane flies can be a nuisance indoors” but they are “medically harmless.”<\/p>\n

So why are there so many flying around this year? For StateImpact Texas partner KUT News<\/a>, Nathan Bernier looks at how a dry year followed by a wetter-than-usual winter has led to a proliferation of the bug<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The explosion of crane flies is a direct product of two things: the drought killed a bunch of plants, and recent rains helped those dead plants rot. There\u2019s nothing that crane fly larvae love more than rotting plant matter.<\/p>\n

Crane flies aren\u2019t the only insect that benefited from the\u00a013 inches<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a016 inches<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0rain Austin has received since January. Fire ants are making a comeback too, says Wizzie Brown, an entomologist with the\u00a0Texas Agrilife Extension Service<\/a>. She tries to lure them out of their holes with hot dogs by placing\u00a0a slice of the meat into a clear pill bottle and waiting about an hour.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the full story at KUT.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ve probably seen them hovering at your windows or waiting at your door. A few may have even flown into your house. They look like giant mosquitoes, and they appear to be everywhere this season. Say hello to the Crane Fly. As Texas A&M University points out on its site devoted to the fly, “large […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":7907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[61],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}