name for ships and aircraft "Mayfly" was the crew's nickname for His Majesty's Airship No. 1, an aerial scout airship built by Vickers but wrecked by strong winds in 1911 before her trial flights. Two vessels of the Royal Navy were named : a torpedo boat launched in January 1907, and a Fly-class river gunboat constructed in sections at Yarrow in 1915. The Seddon Mayfly, which was constructed in 1908, was an aircraft that was unsuccessful in early flight. The first aircraft designed by a woman, Lillian Bland, was titled the Bland Mayfly. Other human uses In pre-1950s France, "chute de manne" was obtained by pressing mayflies into cakes and using them as bird food and fishbait. From an economic standpoint, mayflies also provide fisheries with an excellent diet for fish. Mayflies could find uses in the biomedical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries. Their exoskeleton contains chitin, which has applications in these industries. Research on genome expression in the mayfly Cloeon dipterum, has provided ideas on the evolution of the insect wing and giving support to the so-called gill theory which suggests that the ancestral insect wing may have evolved from larval gills of aquatic insects like mayflies. Mayfly larvae do not survive in polluted aquatic habitats and, thus, have been chosen as bioindicators, markers of water quality in ecological assessments. In marketing, Nike produced a line of running shoes in 2003 titled "Mayfly". The shoes were designed with a wing venation pattern like the mayfly and were also said to have a finite lifetime. The telecommunication company Vodafone featured mayflies in a 2006 branding campaign, telling consumers to "make the most of now". Notes References External links Info about Ephemeroptera on Tree of Life Mayfly Central hosted by Purdue University Extant Pennsylvanian first appearances Featured articles Aquatic insects