robber fly
- noun
- /ˈrɑbər flaɪ/
- Specialized
:
mosca asesina
- With its robust body, the robber fly is effective at hunting and feeding on other flying insects.
Examples
-
Minute, young, predatory larvae of bee flies and robber flies slip through the silica, searching for grubs and clutches of grasshopper eggs.
Academic text (1993) -
One morning, a robber fly heaved heavily by, wavering under the weight of a white butterfly.
Fiction book (1991) -
The robber fly swiftly captured a smaller insect mid-air with its sharp proboscis.
-
In warm weather, the robber fly can often be seen hovering around flowers, waiting for prey.
Synonyms
A large fly that looks like a bee and catches other insects in the air to drink their juices
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound 'robber fly' is a transparent noun–noun combination where 'robber' modifies 'fly' to indicate a fly that 'robs' or seizes prey; the predatory sense (a fly that captures other insects) is directly inferable from the constituents. This pattern of using a human-action noun to label a predatory animal is common cross-linguistically, so a B1 learner who knows both words would likely understand the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
The name robber fly comes from the words robber and fly and from the insect's hunting habit: it flies fast and snatches other insects out of the air, as if it 'robbed' them. That's why the name means a hunting fly that catches other bugs and drinks their juices.
