Jun 022014
My leg having improved considerably since yesterday, today I was able to park near the Rico Rd. intersection and hobble my way up Piney Woods Church Road about a third of the distance and back again. I passed some minute yellow flowers, perhaps an eighth of an inch across, and took a few photographs. But the find of the day was definitely this robber fly or assassin fly, in the family Asilidae (very possibly Promachus fitchii), feasting on a small moth. Robber flies are aggressive predators that pierce their prey with a proboscis, delivering a blend of neurotoxic and digestive enzymes that paralyze their victims and dissolve tissues and internal organs, which they then ingest as if through a straw.
