Archytas ← ChrisR

Some interesting flies from Paraguay

Aug

2011

Today I received a small parcel of Diptera from Ulf in Paraguay – many thanks Ulf! 🙂 In the mix were lots of different families but he had sorted out mainly the calyptrates for me … with an emphasis on the tachinids, of course. Here are the first specimens from the parcel – 2 Tachinini ...

Archytas aurifrons, Townsend

Aug

2011

Last week I spent a happy afternoon at the BMNH, courtesy of Erica & Nigel in the Diptera department. I decided to concentrate on a few genera and try to identify a few neotropical specimens. My first was Archytas, a large genus with many very similar species, because I have a few quite atypical taxa ...

Archytas (French Guiana & Brazil)

Sep

2010

The following is a selection of Archytas sp. from both French Guiana and Brazil showing some of the immense diversity of this genus. Despite their huge variability Archytas spp. usually have a characteristic change in colouration between tergites 1-4 and tergite 5 – the whole abdomen is shiny but tergites 1-4 have a faint, pale ...

Archytas aurifrons, Townsend (pe-taxon #24)

Feb

2010

This is another tachinine tachinid with a slightly variable abdomenal patternation but there and many fundamental similarities between the 2 featured specimens – taking into consideration that one is male and the other is female. This taxon is very similar to fg-taxon #80. EDIT (6/8/2011): After a visit to the BMNH I believe this to ...

Archytas aurifrons (fg-taxon #80) 1

Oct

2009

This nice little tachinid looks very like a Tachininae – similar to fg-taxon #20 but with more black on the abdomen. EDIT (Monty Wood 26/9/2010): These are an Archytas sp. EDIT (6/8/2011): After a visit to the BMNH I believe these to be Archytas aurifrons, Townsend.

fg-taxon #15 (Archytas & Jurinella sp.)

Apr

2009

This is another Tachina look-alike but with a projecting mouth edge, like Linnaemya. EDIT (Monty Wood 26/9/2010): This group contains 3 spp. of Archytas and 1 spp. of Jurinella. The photo shows one of the Archytas sp.:

Tachinid Recording News

Thelyconychia solivaga January 23, 2015
Recently I have been working on adding a new species to the British list to our key. Thelyconychia solivaga is a small tachinid that seems to live on fairly stony/rocky coastal sites and is very rare in the UK – in fact only 3 specimens have been found so far (by Laurence Clemons in Kent […]
The problem with Phryxe … January 20, 2015
The genus Phryxe contains a few common species (nemea, vulgaris & heraclei) and a few very rare ones (magnicornis & erythrostoma). The key pulls out nemea first by the wide gap between the facial-ridge bristles and the descending parafrontals – wider than the width of antenna-3 plus the mustardy/yellow frontal area. Splitting off heraclei has […]
Gonia face colour January 20, 2015
In the keys to Gonia one of the couplets asks you to consider the shininess of the face but this can be a confusing thing to judge when you only have one specimen. In this mini article I have taken photos of the 2 choices to make it clear. The first thing to do is […]
Linnaemya picta, tessellans & rossica confusion features November 27, 2014
For many years Linnaemya picta had been confused with rossica because early workers (e.g. Fonseca) hadn’t tried using the European keys. Since the ‘discovery’ of picta in Kent it has spread across southern England as far as Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire & Berkshire and so now we have another fairly common black-legged species to confuse with tessellans. […]
Siphona urbana or geniculata? September 9, 2013
In Andersen’s 1996 book “The Siphonini (Diptera: Tachinidae) or Europe” he made several changes to the names of Siphona spp., which have proved a bit confusing. The changes (and subsequent reversions) illustrate a few nice aspects of modern taxonomy and so I thought I would write a little piece on what happened. Every species is […]