Snowfleas and Snowflies: Winter Specialists

by Kevin Strauss

With temperatures rising into the 40s and 50s, some early spring insects are walking, hopping or flying around the area, looking for a quick meal and a mate.

While we often think of northland insects as only surviving the winter as eggs or pupae (cocoons), a surprising number of our insects, and most of the ones we see in March, surviving the winter as adults.
Two winter insects that don’t often notice, are the snowflea and the snowfly. While names like these might make a person think that these insects are nothing more than backwoods myths like the legendary “snow snake” that digs round holes in the snow and uses its white scales to hide on a winters day, these “bugs” are real and they live in or on the snow.

Snowfleas, also known as “springtails” because of their flat spring-like tails, are especially visible this time of year. They look like black specks or “pepper” on the spring snow, often at the foot of a large tree. But if you watch them carefully, you’ll see these “pepper flakes” move. If you look at them closely with a magnifying glass, you will just be able to make out the body an legs of these half-centimeter long creatures.

These 6 mm long insects can jump as much as 152 mm with their springy tails. That’s like a 2 m (six foot) human leaping 50 m (150 feet) in a single bound. They sometimes move so fast that they seem to disappear right before your eyes. What snowfleas don’t have in size, they more than make up for in geographic range, living on every continent. Researchers have found them in the middle of glaciers, a half-mile from the edge of the ice, surviving on pine pollen a fern spores that blew onto the ice.

While they have the term “flea” in their common name, it denotes more about their size and jumping ability than their origin. These fleas don’t bite people or pets.

By comparison, the tiny and fast-moving snowflea, the six-legged snowfly is big and slow. This insect is actually a wingless relative of the crane fly, that three-inch-long (7.6 cm) mosquito-like insect that frequents wetlands in the summer. The snowfly is about 2 inches long and it has hairy legs that make some people think it is a spider. But while spiders have eight legs, the snowfly has only six. While snowflies live under the snow for much of the year, when the temperatures get above freezing, they come out and begin searching for a make. They show up well on a white background of snow. After mating, the female snowfly deposits her eggs at the base of a tree. In spring, the eggs hatch and these flies, that don’t really fly, grown into adults by next winter.

So the next time you are outside, keep your eyes open for our amazing snow insects.

The Ely Timberjay