We usually take our big payloader or skidloader and go around and scoop them up.”

Bay City Public Works Director Chris Zenner

BAY CITY — Two-foot tall banks up against the buildings, difficulty seeing out of your windshield and roads as slippery as an oil spill. You would think a snowstorm came in the middle of July, but it was a massive mayfly emergence in Bay City.
“They were pretty nasty yesterday [July 30],” Bay City Public Works Director Chris Zenner said.
Often, the village can be prepared for these emergences, doing what they can to keep the nuisance to a minimum. This time around, the mayflies caught the village off guard.
“This last one was a big surprise,” Zenner said. “Usually, people will go around town and turn a bunch of the lights off and stuff, but this last hatch, especially with the campground, it wasn’t expected. Had a big mess down there too.”
The village works hard to clean up the roads after an event like this, scooping them up and taking them to the dump.
“We usually take our big payloader or skidloader and go around and scoop them up,” Zenner said. “Load up our dump truck and take them to the dump. It’s a three-person project, so one person will be scooping with the skidloader, and the other people will be shoveling and brooming into the bucket.”
The property owners are responsible for any pile ups off the village roads, but they can be swept to the side of the road and public works will collect them when they are sweeping the roads during clean up.
During emergences, the roads can be slippery to drive on and walking is just as slippery. Zenner asked residents to exercise caution when they do emerge.
“Try to avoid the piles,” Zenner said. “They are very slippery. It’s almost like walking on ice.”
Mayfly swarms do not provide a threat to any agriculture or people because they do not feed during their adult stage. The vast majority of their life cycle is spent as a nymph in water. When they do emerge, they mate and die quickly after as their life purpose is fulfilled.
According to Britannica, mayflies lay between 50-10,000 eggs each, depending on the species.
“Mayflies sometimes mistake blacktopped roads for streams, forming swarms over them, and drop eggs on road surfaces,” the website states.
Fish frequently feast on the mayfly population, as do birds, bats and dragonflies, making them a key pierce to the ecosystem.
Due to their use of the moon as a built-in evolutionary navigational system, adult mayflies are found in swarms around man-made light. As anyone from Bay City knows, the confusion from the light has not stopped the insects from completing their mating rituals to bring in new generations of mayflies every year.