Of the small selection of lucky creatures introduced to Apterra, mosquitoes have gotten the best lot of all. No other flying animals exist on this planet, leaving them free to expand unhindered across the skies. They have no aerial predators, no competition with other groups, and inhabit a world rapidly becoming abundant in ever-more-diverse food sources. It's no surprise, then, that some would soon abandon the specialist niche of their ancestors. There are some serious roadblocks to adopting a different lifestyle, though. The most significant of these are the mouthparts of mosquitoes. Over millions of years, these have evolved to be hyper-efficient bloodsucking machines, to the exclusion of almost all other functions. This has been a major hindrance to their diversification, but a few have succeeded in adopting a new way of life, leaving behind their hematophagous ways once and for all.
The sedentary mosquitoes of the Early Muricene now have tens of thousands of descendants, many of which retain the habits of those early pond-dwellers. One offshoot, though, has become a full-time nectarivore, with even the females foregoing blood meals in favor of sweet woodlouse-grass sap. While this food source is far less protein-rich than blood, it is extremely common and poses far less risk of death-by-swatting. These are the Sugarflies, a group characterized by their diet and a few notable physical adaptations. The ancestral sugarfly began with a simple shift from a blood-based to nectar-based food source. The mutations that caused male sedentarius mosquitoes to revert to nectar-drinking have now spread to females as well, causing them to seek out palm-grasses and skystalks for sustenance instead of kiwis and rats.
The wings of sugarflies (family Saccharoculicidae) are large and broad, allowing them to coast many meters without flapping. This is an adaptation to flying long distances in search of food, which Saccharoculicids need a lot of - nearly their body weight in nectar daily. They are less restricted in range than their ancestors; generally, instead of specializing for life around a single body of water, they specialize on a single woodlouse-grass species, adapting to resist its unique blend of toxins and to avoid its particular variety of arboreal isopods. Sugarflies' halteres (the evolutionary remnants of their hindwings) are larger than in other mosquitoes, as maneuverability is vital to evading these defenders. Certain sugarflies can be found across quite large areas, such as the flitfly, which specializes on Mycads and therefore ranges across all of Loxodia's eastern rain-pseudoforests.
While flitflies are nuisances to the mycads upon which they feed, some sugarflies are more beneficial to the grasses that provide their nourishment. The dustfly (Polliniculex) lives in the northern woodlands alongside grasses like the sweetstalk, whose pollen they spread from plant to plant. For this reason, the sweetstalk's woodlice no longer instinctually attack this genus like they do when other sugarflies approach their home. With distinctive chemical markers, the dustflies signal to the isopods (in this case, members of the species Palustrarthrus pluviophilus) that they are friends of the woodlouse-grass, so they are granted safe passage from one sweetstalk to another. No longer needing their hypertrophied halteres for their original evasive purpose, the hindwings are now flattened and further enlarged, supplementing the lift generated by the forewings.
While some sugarflies enhance their mutualism with Apterran flora, others have already begun to swing the other way, actively damaging the plants they feed from. These are the sapsiphons (Phloemyzor), a somewhat basal genus. Notably, while all other sugarflies possess a weak proboscis that can no longer pierce skin, the sapsiphon's mouthparts have never lost this ability. Instead of draining the blood of animals, though, it now leeches off the sap that flows through leaves and stems. This allows it to feed on any plant it likes, instead of being restricted to solely woodlouse-grasses.