May - not by the flies alone...

Without a doubt, the little flies dominate the insect life of the salt marsh in the early to mid-spring. They hop the mudflats, skate the pools, and, swarm the salt marsh grasses. Being small and defenseless, they fall prey to numerous predators from fishes in the water to birds in the sky. Thus, they are trying very hard to complete their life-cycle before many voracious mouths arrive to their neck of the marsh either on wings from the south, or on fins from the estuary.

But, other insects are slowly making their way out of hibernation or popping from the eggs that spent their winter on the marsh. The juices are flowing in the young plants in May, and many herbivores love the tender shoots. Aphids, planthoppers, and true bugs use their elongated syringe like mouthparts to suck  the fresh sap. While this aphid is thus engaged in "milking" the Marsh Elder (Iva frutescens) rosettes, a tiny red "passenger" mite is happily obtaining its meal from the aphid. 

This shield bug is perfectly camouflaged to hide among the dead last season stalks of mixed salt marsh grasses and also sucks the sap out of the young plants

This conehead katydid nymph probably spent the winter on the marsh and now enjoying a snack of fresh salthay "salad". Unlike aphids and shield bugs, grasshopers, katydids and crickets chew their food.

 This gorgeous snout beetle or "true weevil" also feed entirely on plants. They chew holes in the plant tissue and contain some of the most important agricultural pests. Snout beetles are one of the largest group of animals on earth, with over 40,000 described species. For comparison, there are only about 6,000 species of mammals.

This small fellow is a shore bug (Saldidae spp). At a first glance, shore bugs might be easily confused with flies frolicking on a mudflat. They leap and take a short nervous flight as do many salt marsh flies. In fact, true bugs are not even fly relative, or perhaps 10th degree cousins removed. Shore bugs have a beak like all true bugs, and are either predacious or scavengers in the rich muck of the mudflats. Interestingly, these little creatures exhibit different degrees of adaptation to the marine environments - while some are found only on dry land, others remain on the marsh during the hide tide and become completely submerged by water.