Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 2, 2016
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Mayflies are an order (Ephemeroptera) of over 3,000 species of flying insects, related to dragonflies and damselflies. They are relatively primitive, with ancestral traits that were probably present in the first flying insects, such as long tails, and wings that do not fold flat over the abdomen. Their immature stages (nymphs) live in fresh water. Unique among insect orders, they have a fully winged adult stage that moults into a sexually mature adult. Often, all the mayflies in a population mature at the same time, emerging in the spring, summer or autumn in enormous numbers; some hatchings attract tourists. Mayflies are a favourite food of many fish, and fishing flies are often modelled to resemble them. The brief lives of mayfly adults—less than five minutes for the female Dolania americana, after the final moult—have been noted by naturalists and encyclopaedists since Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. The English poet George Crabbe compared a daily newspaper's lifespan to that of a mayfly in the satirical poem "The Newspaper" (1785). (Full article...)