I have just received a really exciting batch of Diptera from Mont Itoupé, French Guiana. This batch comes courtesy of the Parc Amazonien de Guyane and was collected by Stéphane Brule and his colleagues at Société Entomologique Antilles-Guyane (S.E.A.G.). Stéphane also included a few samples that he collected in the northern regions, which come with less conditions of use*.
My first task has been to do a complete inventory of the different tubes and bottles – making a note of all the data so that I can work out how many data label sets I need to create. I will make up data labels (in PDF format) and distribute these to anyone who wants to work on a group.
So far I have only had a close look at 2 of the samples and there seem to be a lot of calliphorids (including many Messembrinellinae, which I am interested in). I have only found 1 tachinid so far, which is a little bit disappointing, but it was at least a genus that I can identify and I am sure there will be plenty more to come. However, there were 4 pantophthalmids in the sample from Réserve Naturelle des Nouragues, which will be a lot easier to work on. 
* the Mont Itoupé samples were collected under a license that asked all people who work on the material to return 1 specimen of everything that is successfully identified. This isn’t really a problem because the sample is quite large and most people I have talked to are happy just to be able to work on such a remote and rarely collected region.
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These are a few asilids I picked up in French Guiana, collected along forest edges in clearings where they sun themselves. When compared to bees of the genus Eulaema it is clear that they are very strong mimics but it is unclear to me why they copy Eulaema and not one of the other, commoner bees. Perhaps because the colours of Eulaema are closer to the normal colour patterns (black, brown & yellow) of other asilids?
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Mallophora tibialis
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Mallophora sp.
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Mallophora tibialis
A Eulaema to compare them to:
Eulaema sp. (male)
(scale marks are 1mm apart in groups of 5mm)
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This is a little post just to show the range of antennal branching in different multifissicorn tachinids – apologies for the poor quality of the photos.
As you can see, Cryptocladocera spp. have huge branches on their antennae while both of the 2 new species have much shorter antennal branches, which seems closer to the description of Cerotachina. Personally, I would like to lump them all into Cryptocladocera but I need to do more research first.
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Cerotachina sp.nov. (Peru, tiny branches)
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Cerotachina sp.nov. (French Guiana, medium branches)
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Cryptocladocera sp. (French Guiana, long branches)
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This little gem is another multifissicorn species with feathered antennae – similar to the other ‘featherface’ tachinids, like Borgmeiermyia and Cryptocladocera. However, after running this through Arnaud (1963) it keys out as Cerotachina but doesn’t conform to either of the 2 known species so I am considering this a new, as yet undescribed species.
In summary, this species keys to Cerotachina because it has no median discal bristles the branches on antennae-3 are short – much less than 1/3 the length of antenna-3. The 2 existing species (C.elegantula & C.albula) are described as having a black body and black femur with darkened tibiae but this species has a dark-brownish ground colour (especially on the pleurae) and wholly bright orange legs.
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This is a lovely specimen of Belvosia, donated by Villu Soon from specimens he collected in French Guiana.
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This is a really interesting group of species – all very similar in general body shape and with a curious ovipositor that appears to emerge vertically, under the abdomen.
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Today I had the very great pleasure to open the latest parcel of interesting flies – this time from Martin Hauser, in California. Martin had sent a nice selection of North & South American tachinids along with 3 pantophthalmids. The tachinids are superb but I will post more about them later – today I concentrated on remounting and identifying the pantos, which had suffered a little in the Xmas post.
The identifications weren’t too difficult but the specimens were a bit greasy, which is a common problem with large-bodied insects and which can obscure valuable dusting features. Luckily the palpi and the ‘noses’ were intact and they provided some very useful secondary features. For instance, P.planiventris is a very dull and faintly marked species but it has a lovely pair of yellow, swollen-ended palps with pointed tips and a long ‘beak’ of a nose on the face. P.batesi also has a pointed ‘nose’ but luckily it has some quite distinct dark spots on the thorax. Lastly, P.argyropastus is a new species to me and has a quite distinctive protruding ‘nose’ with a rouded tip. Martin had showed me some lovely photos of a male in his collection that was almost entirely covered in silvery dusting. Sadly the new one is a female so it is much less well marked, with normal panto colours and some small silvery spots on the tergites.
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Pantophthalmus argyropastus (female), from Nicaragua
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Pantophthalmus argyropastus (female), from Nicaragua
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Pantophthalmus argyropastus (female), from Nicaragua
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Pantophthalmus batesi (female), from French Guiana
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Pantophthalmus batesi (female), from French Guiana
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Pantophthalmus batesi (female), from French Guiana
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Pantophthalmus planiventris (female), from Panama
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Pantophthalmus planiventris (female), from Panama
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Pantophthalmus planiventris (female), from Panama
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I have extracted a few evanoid-like braconids from the recent French Guianan batch and amongst the Cenocoeliinae I found a few of these, which I didn’t think was related but Yves Braet (an expert on French Guianan braconids) suggested Foenomorpha and after a bit of Googling I found a key (by Yves) that suggests that this is Foenomorpha senlura – it feels amazing to get a species-level identification for a neotropical wasp 
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This is a real Phasia lookalike with it’s body shape and wing venation, but I have run it through the keys in Sun & Marshall and compared the venation and genitalia to the figures and I can’t see anything that comes close enough to convince me that it is a Phasia sp. – the bend in the median vein is too right-angled and the frons too wide for any of the known neotropical species.
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Here is another little distraction from my normal interests in the form of a French Guianan ichneumon called Apechoneura of the subfamily Labeninae. Many thanks to Gavin Broad of the NHM for the identification. I had initially thought that it was a rhyssine because it has a wonderfully ridged thorax but this is also a feature of Apechoneura.
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This one is unusual because the abdomen is tipped with a strange, shiny, flattened structure that resembles a squashed tube.
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A really unusual medium-sized tachinid with large curved-under genitalia. In addition to that it has widely separated T1+2 marginals, a projecting mouth edge, 2 katepisternals, quite short antennae & a small ‘Sturmia-spot’.
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I like to split the processing of Malaise trap samples into several distinct phases. The first phase is to empty the tubes of insects suspended in alcohol into individual tupperware trays and then work through them, splitting out the groups that I am interested in (mainly tachinids) and that I collect for friends.
The tachinids are then dried out slightly on filter-papers and then micropinned into flat, plastic boxes (as on the right of the photo). During this process I hook-out the male genitalia so that they can be viewed easily later. The other sorted samples that will be sent to other entomologists are stored in alcohol-tight tubes – one tube per date/collector/family.
Once the tachinids have dried out fully the next phase is to move the flies onto foam stages, give them a data label and pin them into working drawers. These drawers are work spaces where I can start looking for taxa that I have already described and pull out new taxa.
In this batch I have 273 tachinids plus about another 50 Hymenoptera and other Diptera families. I haven’t seen anything stunning this time but there are a lot of interesting taxa … lots of Borgmeiermyia cf. brasiliana etc.
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I have just received a really exciting batch of Diptera from Mont Itoupé, French Guiana. This batch comes courtesy of the Parc Amazonien de Guyane and was collected by Stéphane Brule and his colleagues at Société Entomologique Antilles-Guyane (S.E.A.G.). Stéphane also included a few samples that he collected in the northern regions, which come with less conditions of use*.
