I’ve had to deal with huge swarms of these things every summer for the few years I’ve lived a mile away from a lake. I assumed they were mosquitoes until recently.
Is it some kind of midge fly? How can you tell? If I were to make an uneducated guess, I’d say it’s not a mosquito because there’s not a straight proboscis.
Here in Toronto area it is easy to tell the genders. Male mosquitoes are about 10 times the size of the females. Big honking things that look terrifying but do not harm. Are the squitos different gender sizes in different other areas?
So I’d consider myself a very amateur entomologist so am very open to being wrong here, but that’s not a thing to my knowledge; if anything, the males tend to be smaller. You might be seeing two different species, or are misidentifying another insect for a male mosquito.
I could be wrong. I have seen them for 60 yrs and anyone who sees them also calls them male mosquitoes. Now I am going to check it out and see. It’s summer now and there will be a few of them flying around that I can snap a pic of and see.
I searched and got this for male mosquito. This looks exactly like what I am talking about. They are way bigger and have no long proboscis for drinking.
That’s a crane fly. They have lots of nicknames and folk identities so it’s super common to call them something else. I’ve heard them called “mosquito hawks” (they don’t hunt mosquitoes) but male mosquitoes is a new one to me. You could add it to the Wikipedia page lol
All those years. I stand corrected. Love to learn new shtuff.
Can confirm this is a crane fly, aka Tipuloidea sp.