Another fantastic parcel from Eric & Martin

Today my postman huffed & puffed his way up the driveway with another box of specimens from Eric Fisher & Martin Hauser. My parcel wasn’t really all that heavy but I think the postie liked to make a point … he was feeling over-worked trying to get parcels to everyone before Easter 😉

Inside was a wonderful array of tachinid flies from Venezuela, Brazil, USA, Bolivia, Ecuador, South Korea and a few from Madagascar & Australia. I could recognize a few genera in my first glances but it will take a long time to actually identify these so I have started by photographing some of the more interesting ones for you to see 🙂

EDIT (Monty Wood, 26/9/2010): Monty has updated and confirmed the names of all the Neotropical tachinids in this post.

Many thanks to Eric & Martin for their wonderful specimens – they will give me months and months of fun working on them 🙂

EDIT: The Prosena sp. was identified by myself with reference to Crosskey’s “Conspectus of the Tachinidae of Australia” (1973). This is quite a large genus in Australia so I will try some comparissons with material at the NHM in the future. This species is at least different from P.siberita, in that it has a much smaller proboscis than that ubiquitous Palearctic species.

The Hermya sp. & Alophorophasia sp. were identified by myself using Crosskey’s “Taxonomic Conspectus of the Tachinidae (Diptera) of the Oriental Region” (1976).

EDIT (27.v.2010): Many thanks to Monty Wood for pointing out that my “Uramya” were actually Trichodura sp. 🙂