We call it Tiszavirágzás, or Tisza blooming. Every year from late spring to early summer, a natural spectacle transforms Hungary's Tisza River. Villagers come to marvel at the "flowers" blooming on the river's surface—millions of long-tailed mayflies. Rising in huge clouds, they take flight, reproduce, and perish, all in just a few hours.
My father, who grew up in a village not far from the river, often told me how the fishermen and ferrymen seemed to know from experience when the mayflies would appear. I sought out those people to pinpoint the exact place and time to photograph the sudden mayfly masses.
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The "ephemeron," Aristotle called the short-lived mayfly, which numbers 2,000 species worldwide. With males measuring up to five inches from head to tail, the Tisza's Palingenia longicauda is Europe's largest mayfly.
Shortly after mating, females lay eggs on the river's surface. The eggs drift to the bottom and after 45 days hatch into larvae, which dig tunnels forming dense colonies up to 400 per square foot. After three years larvae break for the surface where females molt once and males shed twice: first into a brief subadult stage then again minutes later into adulthood. After both sexes have fully matured, mayflies have roughly three hours before they die.
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During the mating period the river's surface explodes to life. Adult males flutter above the water, their wings a whir. There is no courtship in the mayfly repertoire. Reproduction is often a forcible act with up to 20 males simultaneously going after a lone female. An eager male might also lie in wait atop the skin of a female that has yet to shed.
Photograph by József L. Szentpéteri
That's what biologist and photographer József L. Szentpéteri calls this frenzied circle of male mayflies, all trying to mate with a single female. On Hungary's Tisza River the annual summer emergence of the insects is known as the Tisza Blooming. Three years ago many feared a Tisza Extinction. In January 2000 a series of toxic spills from Romanian mines contaminated the Tisza, killing wildlife and more than a thousand tons of fish. The mayflies apparently survived because their larvae were buried deep in mud on the bottom, and, a few weeks later, a major flood purged many of the pollutants.
