Last year’s tachinids all identified – finally!

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 seem because most of them were common species that I am very familiar with but it was still quite time consuming:

The top box is full of tachinids, with a few Hymenoptera and the bottom box is mainly sarcophagids, with some miscellaneous Hymenoptera and Diptera families that still need working on … maybe a wet weekend later in the year 😉

To illustrate how important it is to collect plenty of the common species, I had over 35 of the very common Exorista rustica but within that batch were 2 of the much rarer Exorista mimula, which can only be split on male genitalia! Also, the 4 small, black, shiny tachinids that I had assumed were Dufouria chalybeata in the field were actually 2x Macquartia praefica and 2x Dufouria nigrita (a species I had never seen before).