Hello Summertime!

Hope you guys are sitting comfortably......

The last time I posted here, springtime was just about to happen. And now it's the middle of July, so I guess it's fair to say that I've been a bit slack of late. If you follow my other blog (and I sincerely hope you do) you'll see that I have actually been active, despite the lack of posts here. The trouble is, I've been spending quite a bit of time messing about with plants rather than with spiders and flies. In truth I'm finding the spiders quite hard work, as a result I haven't spent very much time with them lately. I did scoop this rather lovely looking Pirata piraticus from the surface of a pool at the bottom of Coire a' Tairneilear a month or so back.

Adult female Pirata piraticus - a lifer for me

A week later I swept a couple of adult female Microlinyphia pusilla from a grassy patch of heathland, these were lifers for me too. Nationally it's a very widespread spider but, according to its SRS species account, there are just a handful of Skye records, all from the southern half of the island. Mine were near Portree, which very definitely qualifies as being in the northern half of Skye.  

Adult male Metellina mengei - different backgrounds to show the long hairs on metatarsus 1

I've recently started to see Araneus diadematus again for the frst time this year, always on coastal rockfaces which is pretty much the only place I ever find them up here. The vernacular name is Garden Spider. I've never seen one in a garden on Skye! I'm seriously thinking about lobbying to get the name changed to Coastal Rock Spider...

Araneus diadematus - quite a small one scrunched into a crack in the rock

A fairy well grown male Araneus diadematus scurrying across a coastal rockface

Other than finding Pholcus phalangioides in areas of the hotel I've never seen them before - housekeeping must be getting slovenly (sheesh, I hope they never hear me say that!!!), it's gone pretty quiet for all things arachnological, though I am still finding plenty of Mitopus morio on the hills, including this one exhibiting the pinkest dorsal stripe I've ever seen

I think my enthusiasm for entomology hit an all-time low a few weeks back. No real reason behind it, just stuff and whatnot, but I've definitely been through a bit of a 'phasing' event. To combat this, I've decided to change tack regards collecting specimens. Firstly I have decided to ease back with the spiders. There are lots of them and coming to a correct identification is usually quite an effort. Well it is for me, at least. If it isn't fun (and if you're not being paid for it), don't do it - it's that simple. So I'm easing back. That's not to say I'm stopping (hell no!) I still intend to learn much more about spiders as the year progresses, but I'm not prepared to wear myself into the ground trying to hit 100 species in a year, or whatever it was I was initially hoping to identify. That should be good news for The Ghost who, I believe, is struggling to find very much in the way of hopper activity down south. Our 'friendly' Challenge will doubtless remain in place until 11:59:59 on Dec 31st this year. He can be a stubborn git somewhat relentless like that.

I did something last week which pleased me no end, I accidentally knocked a Nuctenea umbratica from its hidey hole under the rim of a wheelie bin (no, that's not what pleased me, just read on...) As I said sometime earlier this year, these spiders have always made me very wary - they just look so evil! So I made a promise to myself that I'd handle the very next one I found, which is exactly what I did. Admittedly it wasn't fully grown, but it wasn't exactly small either. I let it run across my hands for a few seconds before it jettisoned to the ground on a silken line. And it didn't bother me at all! I make that Seth 1 : Arachnophobia 0. Get in, Gibster! Combating my mild arachnophobia was part of the reason I chose to look at spiders this year, it seems to be working too. I even found myself picking up a Tetragnatha montana a few weeks back, have you seen the size of the jaws on those things? They could probably peel the roof off a car! Anyway, it ran, well loped really, across my hand as I lifted it from my sweep net to return it unharmed to the grasses. 

Tetragnatha sp. - probably montana, but immature so I didn't collect it

And what about the flies, I hear you ask. 

Well, there are several dipteran families that I'm already fairly familiar with (unlike the spiders), so I've taken a slightly different approach with them. Basically I'm largely ignoring anything that doesn't grab my attention or anything I don't think I'll enjoy keying through. So that gets rid of those leggy bastard craneflies for starters! Ha, I jest. Some are alright, but I think I need to be in the right frame of mind to bother swiping at small limoniids, for instance. If I see a Nephrotoma I'm having it, but by and large it's a case of live and let live with craneflies and gnats. I may give them some decent attention later, I'll just have to see how it pans out. Muscids. Man, they've certainly fallen from grace for me. I think it's precisely because they are so damned ubiquitous that I've amassed a considerable backlog (again!) of muscids and anthomyiids. So I'm steering clear of those too. Calliphorids, scathophagids, clegs, soldierflies, hoverflies and a few other families are where it's at for me. I enjoy those, so they definitely stay. I've quite a collection of empids and doli flies on pins, and they're ok most of the time, but I need to be in the right frame of mind before sitting down at the microscope with them. Reading that list back to myself, it seems I've plumped for the 'big and easy' flies. Hmmm, maybe? Not sure if that's true or not, but what's important is that they are families that I can find most days of the week (well, not soldierflies. They're a bit thin on the ground around here) and I enjoy keying them. 

Here are a few of the flies I've seen since my last post some three months ago (insert facepalm emoji). First up, a few from May

Gymnocheta viridis (Tachinidae) - always a pleasure to see one of these

Bibio marci (Bibionidae) - pretending to be a limpet. Unbelievably, this really is the first one I've ever seen on Skye!

Cynomya mortuorum (Calliphoridae) - led me a merry chase before letting me grab this piccie!

Male Bibio leucopterus (Bibionidae) - milky wing membrane and equal-sized spurs on fore tibia

Female Eristalis intricaria (Syrphidae) - image taken looking into the light, so it's a shit shot of a lovely bee mimic

Molophilus ater (Limoniidae) - flightless craneflies that were swarming on grasses

I was decidedly less active on the diptera front in June, but I did still drum up enough enthusiasm to drag mysef away from the plants long enough to find a few bits and pieces

Eristalinus aeneus (Syrphidae) - as found by a visiting Ali! 

Phyllodromia melanocephala (Empididae) - a truly bizarre 2.4mm long raptorial fly

Male Xylota segnis (Syrphidae) - more usually seen on leaf surfaces than in a flowerhead

Rhagio scolopaceus (Rhagionidae) - it just wouldn't be summer without these guys!

Lots of these on Goldenrod. Looks frighteningly similar to Calycomyza solidaginis which would be entirely new to Britain.....shoulda grabbed some to rear through!

Aberrant Xyphosia miliaria (Tephritidae) with three bodies, two heads and six wings...

Pegomya steini (Anthomyiidae) - three larvae inside an Alpine Saw-wort mine 

A bit of a mixed bag so far. I should have been swiping flies left, right and centre at this time of year, but the thought of facing another backlog box full of unnamed specimens was just too demoralising to contemplate. I've only really started getting back into flies again this past week or so. 

The arrival of clegs is always something to look forward to...ha! I'd managed to find just one single solitary cleg up until the end of June (sweet!), but this last couple of weeks they've suddenly become annoyingly commonplace (I swatted SIX whilst up a ladder painting a wall). Remember, amongst other things, I'm also the gardener here at the hotel. There are nine lawns to mow, plus I have another three to do just down the road a bit. Then there are numerous strips of grass which get strimmed rather than mown. All in all, I'm a slow moving target for a good few hours of each week, and a complete sitting duck for any clegs intent on a blood meal. Mercifully I don't react to their bites, in fact I barely notice them at all - just a sudden itchy jab as they bite (and immediately get swatted away). Far more annoying are the legions of anthomyiids that form small swarms around my face, follow me back and forth across the lawns, landing on my nose, my ears, my lips - they have absolutely no filters, the little shits! Swatting them away is pointless, they just come straight back. Anyway, despite the fact that they try to bite me, I quite like clegs. I'm ever hopeful of finding one that isn't Haematopota pluvialis, a dream that has only been realised once so far this year when one that was in the back of a car with me turned out to be Haematopota crassicornis. Here's a coupla pics of Haematopotus pluvialis, the Notch-horned Cleg. 

Almost every horsefly I see is this species. At least you can hear them coming...

Rhagoletis alternata (Tephritidae) - wing-waving denizens of a Japanese Rose hedge on Raasay

Phytomyza minuscula (Agromyzidae) - there are very few Skye records for this Aquilegia miner

My two standout fly finds so far this month concern a blowfly and a fleshfly. Calliphora uralensis is a strictly coastal fly, in fact it's vernacular name is the Seabird Bluebottle. Murdo from HBRG mentioned to me three or four years ago that this fly, found along much of the coastline of NW Scotland, appeared to have no records at all from Skye - despite it being found to all points of the compass around about. He asked me to find the fly and plug that hole. Last year Tom Hughes, a young visiting dipterist, had the audacity to find uralensis before I did. Eleven whole months later, I finally found my own (and Tom, bless him, congratulated me!) Here is Calliphora uralensis as swept from clifftop Wild Angelica. In fact, I swept three. This is one of the two males I collected.

What a glorious beast it is. I've wanted to find this fly for several years now, partly because it's a localised northern insect, partly because of the exotic-sounding name ("You mean it's from The Urals? Really? Wow..."), but also because I do genuinely like calliphorids. I've added it to iRecord seeing as 1) it's not a common fly and 2) I'm chuffed to feckery with the pics! The last image above shows the general habitat. See that small stack, I clambered down to the base of it to check out some plants. Calliphora uralensis was down there too, just sat there warming up on rocks. Not that I could reach any of them with my net, not without involving a long fall afterwards.

As for the fleshfly....

I was clambering coastal outcroppings with Neil 'Rockhopper' Roberts last week, when he pointed out two flies just over a ledge. I clambered up to where he was stood, spotted the flies (a pair in cop), quickly realised they were the first sarcophagids I've ever seen up here and immediately went into panic mode. I stealth-ninja'd my way closer, swung my net and bingo! Got them!!! I potted them up, knowing full well that there are hardly any sarcophagid records for the Inner Hebrides (turns out there are just four species noted for The Hebrides, three of which have been recorded on the Inner Hebs and just two of those from Skye itself).

I don't have any pics of the flies in situ, so here's some I took of them afterwards. I do sometimes feel a bit bad about killing stuff just to ID it, but I figure they're going to die one way or the other, and this way they do at least make it into recording schemes and the history books rather than just die forever undiscovered and of no scientific benefit. Plus, with sarcophagids at least, you do need the specimen to secure a safe ID. 

So that's a few angles of the female. Of course, seeing as this pair were in cop when I swiped them, the male will be the same species. Well, it should be, at least. Female sarcophagids are largely unidentifiable, you need to check the genitalia of the male to get to species. In this instance the female can be identified through association. Here's a coupla crappy pics of the male's bits

I put these images onto the Sarcophagidae FB Group (yep, that's a real thing) whereby sarcophagid guru Daniel Whitmore stated that he didn't know what this was, though it resembled Sarcophaga portschinskyi (currently only known from Ireland and not the UK) and that he needed to see a proper "dick pic" - his exact scientific phrase, lol. Since then he's contacted me again, directly this time, asking me to properly set the genitalia because he thinks it may be a species new to Britain. 

So stay tuned for further updates. If the forthcoming pics don't match anything known to be British, I'm sending the bodies to Germany for Daniel to examine for himself. I've never had a fly new to Britain before..... a moth, a plant and a fungus yes, but never a fly! 

An Early Doli

Yesterday was a day of extremes. It started nice and sunny, though still rather cold with snow on the hills and the occasional light flurry of hail. Around midday I noticed a sizeable fly sat splayed on the wall outside my bedroom. Not expecting to see a fly whilst walking to the garage I didn't have a pot on my person, so I hastily nipped back indoors and grabbed one. A few seconds later and the fly was safely secured.

From this angle I was still puzzled as to which family it belonged. The splay-legged stance seemed wrong for anything other than craneflies and their allies - clearly it wasn't one of those! Maybe a long-legged soldierfly? Where there any? I popped in a wad of tissue laced with ethyl acetate and sat back to wait for the fumes to do their stuff. 

Once I was able to view the fly from different angles, it was immediately apparent that it was a doli fly, one of the Long-legged Flies from the family Dolichopodidae. Wow, I wasn't expecting that! I wouldn't have expected to see a doli for at least another month or so, and I'm much more used to finding them in the woodland and wetter areas of meadows than on the wall of a building. Bit of a curve ball, but it's a very distinctive-looking family of flies, so who was this huge (9mm long) doli that was active in the cold? 

What a STUNNER!!!

The colours don't really show up too well in that image, but the greens are properly sea green with turquoise running through everything. It's a beautiful fly, it really is. Note the diffuse dark spot in the wing, I figured that would be a clinching feature. Also just look at the head shape, bizarre!

Just look at the shimmer on the frons and the intricate striping on the thorax - this is a lovely fly!

It really didn't take me very long to figure this as a female Liancalus virens, which is the largest doli fly in north west Europe. I was still somewhat confused about the early date and habitat, but reading online it seems that these beautiful flies are active throughout the year - though peaking during the summer months - and the preferred habitat is wet gullies, water wells, wet walls and even just leaky water pipes! With that in mind, I'm surprised I haven't seen them before. Skye is currently awash with surface water and there are plenty of overflowing drains around Uig! 

I'm on the look out for a male Liancalus next, they have a small white mark at the wingtip. Presumably they indulge in some sort of wing-waving or wing-flicking during courtship. 

Flushed with success at actually finding a fly, I hit Uig Wood where, during light snow flurries, I found the pattern-winged midge Macropelopia nebulosa and a phorid which is female and hence possibly unidentifiable. Then I was caught out in some ferocious sideways hail a mere forty minutes walk from home. Damn but I was soaked by the time I made it indoors. Some spring this is turning out to be! I did notice several unopened blossom buds on the blackthorn bushes, reckon they'll be open in a week or so. That's assuming the hail didn't obliterate them all. Blossom means warmth and insects, I'm getting a tad fed up seeing pictures on FB of hoverflies and tachinids rolling through pollen laden catkins and blossoms from further south. Meh, the only hoverfly I've seen this year was a larva in January and I haven't even seen my first bluebottle of the year yet! 

Macropelopia nebulosa - blurry due to my wiping snowflakes off the tube!

 

The midge was confirmed by Tony Irwin on the UK Diptera FB page. He identified one for me a couple of years back and I thought this looked the same. Happy days. My fly yearlist now stands at a huge thirty species, with twelve of those being lifers for me. It'll get going soon, I just know it will. Not sure what The Ghost is currently on, more than thirty I suspect. 

A Mitey Struggle

Wow, has it really been two weeks since my last blogpost? Well yes it has, and never mind tutting and shaking your head like that, there's a reason for this. Everywhere up here is either flooded or completely sodden, the rain has been epic. I think we've had maybe four dryish days of which only two were windless and bright enough to stimulate a bit of insect activity. Naturally I had to make use of those days to get some outstanding exterior painting finished, so all in all I haven't seen more than a handful of spiders for weeks and almost every fly I've seen has been a gnat or midge. Not very inspiring! It's currently wet again and the wind chill is supposed to be dropping the temperatures to -9C tomorrow. So that's something to look forward to...

But enough of that doom and gloom rubbish, because my arachnid list has grown by one with the addition of a bee that was handed to me yesterday. Say what? I hear you cry. I shall explain.

My housemate brought me an almost dead bumblebee in a small container. It had flown through his window and disappeared behind a chair, whereupon he took his shoe off and smashed the bejeezus out of it. How it was still alive I have no idea. I explained that bees at this time of year are all pregnant queens, and that by killing this one he had in effect killed off an entire nest's worth. He just stared at me in a confused fashion, said I could keep the container, and walked off. Sheesh. 

I was just about to give it the ethyl acetate treatment (the bee I mean, not my housemate) when I noticed a small dot leap from the bee and land upside down in my killing jar. Bees don't have fleas, and pseudoscorpions don't generally leap, so who was this tiny acrobat of a hitch-hiker? 

Doubtless wondering where its bee has disappeared to

Aah, it's a mite. The only mites I know of that are associated with bees are the Varroa destructor mites. A quick look online showed me that firstly Varroa isn't associated with Bombus bees, and secondly that they look absolutely nothing like the beast I was puzzling over through the barrel of my microscope. Hmmm, I was suddenly intrigued!

More online digging quickly brought the phoretic mite Parasitellus fucorum to my attention. It seemed a good match and specialises in Bombus bees. Cool - but I bet there are several other species that turn up on bees. I dug around some more and realised there are several genera of mites that could occur on bumblebees. Arse. I asked the PSL Facebook Group for help finding a key and sat back awaiting a response. Nothing for the fifteen seconds I waited (I'm not great with being patient), so I dug some more and eventually found Mites of the subfamily Parasitinae (Mesostigmata: Parasitidae) in the British Isles. Turns out that there are lots of parasitic mites. 

By now, young Finley the PSL whizzkid had responded. He said it would probably turn out to be Parasitellus fucorum (he obviously did the same quick internet trawl as I had!) and sent me a link to this key which, although American, covers the European species too. Big thanks to Finley, the key is ace. It was incredibly easy to start whittling my way through the initial 117 mite families down to easily manageable numbers and within about ten minutes I had arrived at just two options for my mite - Parasitus or Parasitellus. Cool beans, now we're getting somewhere! All I had to do was count the pairs of setae on the underside of the mite - more than 40 pairs and it was Parasitellus, less than 30 pairs and it was Parasitus. To make it easier for myself, I took a photo and enlarged it on the laptop screen, just so I didn't accidentally double count any 'dots'. How difficult could this be. A quick count of the area to the right of the midline came to about 30 dots - Parasitus. 

Not very many at all, I reckon that's good for Parasitus

I dived headlong into the Parasitus section of the key and soon discovered that there are only ten species in Britain and most of those aren't associated with bees. This would be a doddle, or so I thought. After quite some time I realised that none of the species described, including the ones not known to associate with bees, fully fitted my beast. It shared features with some, but not the full suite for any one species. Even given individual variation, I couldn't make it fit a species. I didn't believe for a second I had a hybrid mite. The key was written in 1980, it seemed entirely likely that new species of phoretic mite could have been discovered in Britain during the intervening 41 years, whether an overlooked native or a recent addition. I pondered whether such a 'recent addition' could have become widely established up and down the country by now. Tree Bee has managed it, maybe they brought in new mites with them? So was I looking at a recent arrival, one that wasn't in the key? 

Of course, the most obvious conclusion was that I'd messed up in the family key, so I ran my mite through it once more. Yet again it dropped out at the Parasitus/Parasitellus option. Dropped out convincingly too. Maybe it was a Parasitellus? Time to count those dots again. This time I coloured them in as I went along, just to be doubly sure.

Oh, so that's a bit embarrassing! Allowing for the shallow depth of field rendering some setae invisible, I suddenly have about 40 dots which will clearly place this mite into Parasitellus not Parasitus. Fooksake, sometimes I really am an idiot! I turned to the relevant section and started again. This time there were a mere four species to contend with, all of which are associated with Bombus bees. This seemed promising. I scrolled down to the first species account and immediately recognised the illustrated palp armature and sternal plate as belonging to my beast - yes!!! Finally everything fitted properly and perfectly, all setae in the correct place, the tectum was a perfect match, the form of the enlarged inner bristles on the palps - everything! 

Note the shape and relative sizes of the dorsal shields on my photo and in the illustration. It doesn't show up in my image, but the microsculpture shown in the illustration was clear to see through the microscope. Note also the two very large setae sticking out from the sides of the body. Most other species have these setae either shorter or pointing forwards. Also, there is a lot of uncovered dorsal area around and behind the posterior dorsal shield, most species have the shield covering a larger area. 

This is the sternal shield on the underside of the mite. As soon as I clapped eyes on the illustration I knew it was a match for my mite's sternal shield. See how the side margin is concave below the shoulders and then fills out to nicely rounded sides - most other species don't show this. Coupled with the precise size and orientation of the structures above the shield, again very variable between the species, I was happy this was my species. But I had more features to crosscheck first.

This is the tectum, a pointed process that sits on the front of the head and varies in shape between age, sex and species of mite. I ought to have mentioned this earlier; mites have several different stages of development and mine was a deutonymph, which is essentially a sub-adult phase. Larger, older and more developed than a larva but not as well developed as an adult. Anyway, the shape of the tectum in this particular species is wholly different from that of any other deutonymph (or adult) and was another entirely confirmatory feature ticked off.

This was the one feature that I simply could not match up with any of the Parasitus species, the main reason I started over (twice...) and began to think I had a species that wasn't shown in the key. The lower of the three enlarged spines should be bifid or enlarged at the tip in Parasitus. With a squint I could see what looked like a couple of tiny notches in the lower surface, but clearly the spine itself was not bifid or enlarged in any way. However... move across to Parasitellus and suddenly it all falls into place beautifully.

And what species did I have? Parasitellus fucorum, which is what Finley told me it would be right before I even looked at a key. Bloody whizzkid, bless him. 

Parasitellus fucorum is far and away the commonest of the phoretic mites to be found on Bombus bumblebees. It is widespread across much of Britain (though there are no records on NBN for any phoretic bee mites that I can see) as can be seen in this extract of the species account

Could be new for Skye though! 

So it's not a spider. And it's not a fly. But it is a species for my 2021 Challenge with The Ghost. At least I think it is. I can't recall now if he was allowing me all arachnids or just spiders. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see how far behind me he falls before he starts moving the goalposts to his own advantage once more...