I recently read that adult crane flies consume nectar or do not eat at all, their only purpose is to mate. After a crane fly mates, is starvation the cause of its death, or is there something else that ends its life such as age?
Adult crane flies survive from all the fat they have, from their larval and pupal stage.When they run out of it, they eventually cannot find food, and by that time, they should die of age.It's probably both causes, if not because of predators,disease..etc
Most adult crane flies do not have functioning mouth parts so they are unlikely to feed even on nectar. Once they have mated they quickly become the prey of birds, spiders, etc, and their corpses are also cleared up by ants and so on. Certainly they don't survive for long.
