We’re used to seeing flies all the time, probably throwing up on your plate of food or hovering around a garbage can, but how often do we see flies do something awe-inspiring like breathe underwater?

The research was conducted by Floris van Breugel, a National Geographic Society Committee for Exploration and Research grantee and postdoctoral candidate at the University of Washington. The National Geographic Society funded van Breugel to study the flies that inhabit Mono Lake. It’s the same species of flies, he says, that Mark Twain wrote about 150 years ago in his book Roughing It—“because they’re really just that entertaining to watch,” says van Breugel. (Watch flies eat a donut.)

The sheer number of flies that inhabit