This weekend I have been having another look at the Armenian and Russian samples and hit the same problem … a really puzzling but very…
(updated, now that I have seen the specimens under a microscope! ;)) Today’s jaunt was to Cogden beach (Dorset, SY502881) to pick up a bit of…
Today we went for a ramble through Hooke Park, a lovely piece of mixed woodland with wide rides and open, cleared areas. There’s everything from…
Went over to Powerstock Common (West Dorset) today and, much to my surprise, I actually saw some good insects. Powerstock is a real gem of…
Yesterday Malcolm Storey (bioimages.org.uk) brought over some new equipment he had just bought for photo-stacking, along with a ‘kit’ including a spare dSLR (3MP Nikon…
I have finally finished going through the tachinids that I caught last year and putting names to them. It wasn’t as hard as it might…
There was less sun than the weather forecast had promised but it was still quite a mild day (18C) so I went for a troll…
Here are a couple of French Guianan Pantophthalmus spp. that I picked up from Erica’s volunteers at the NHM today (Pantophthalmus indet. on the left…
On Tuesday Erica McAlister lent me some pantophthalmids from a sample she had been sent by SEAG in French Guiana. Today I went through them…
This is a lovely little taxon, with matt-black ground colour and bright pale-grey bands of dusting on the thorax and abdomen. It fails to achieve…
This keys to Hyphantrophaga sp. but it needs confirming. EDIT (6/01/2011): Monty has said that this genus is quite anonymous and difficult to split ……
These photos illustrate 3 species of Mystacella – a tachinid that, like Chrysoexorista, is a beautiful metallic green (sometimes across the whole body, but at…
This one keys out nicely to Austrophorocera but this determination will need confirming. The abdomen has a fascinating and highly distinctive tuft of orange hair…
Today I had a request for some specimens of Evaniidae from Ricardo Kawada, a PhD student and researcher in Sao Paulo. This forced me to…
A week ago I received a really nice parcel of tachinids from Jari Flinck in Finland and today I had time to sort over them…
Adrian Pont gave me this rather beautiful Costa Rican tachinid recently and it instantly reminded me of the Eucelatoria sp. that I had been working…
Yet another fly that keys to Atactosturmia … would be nice one day to know which of them really are Atactosturmia 😉
An interesting species that superficially looked similar to the Uramya from the same batch but this has bare eyes. EDIT (26/11/2010): Monty Wood says that…
The Polideini is becoming one of my favourite tribes because they have such unusual features. Most tachinids have a disc-like, hairy lappet covering the metathoracic…
This one keys quite confidently to Uramya sp. but it is a female so it lacks any tails that might confirm the determination. EDIT (26/11/2010):…