Ebenia ← ChrisR

Ebenia sp. ??? (French Guiana)

Oct

2010

Recently I have found quite a few small, black tachinids with a very plumose arista. Some are entirely black and others are a little dusted but they all have the anterior katepisternal bristle directly ventral to the pleural suture, which is a very unusual feature and suggests to me that if they aren’t Ebenia (a ...

Ebenia sp. (pe-taxon #28)

Feb

2010

This is a small, black tachinid with plumose antennae, suggesting Dexiinae. These are photos of both the male and the female. EDIT (04/10/2010): This keys very confidently to Ebenia and looks very similar to one identified by Monty. This genus has been reared from chrysomelid beetles.

fg-taxon #82 (Ebenia sp.)

Oct

2009

This is a bit of an oddity and might actually be a rhinophorid – it has a fairly complete subscutellum; diverging calyptrae and a small, roundish head. But it’s hard to guess what neotropical rhinophorids look like. EDIT (Monty Wood 26/9/2010): This is an Ebenia 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 […]