Photograph by Greg Goebel.
Syrphidae – hover fly or flower fly, Loveland, Colorado.
Can any reader identify this fly – that is, provide the correct binomial name (genus and species)?
Syrphidae
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This page contains a single entry by Matt Young published on June 7, 2010 12:00 PM.
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Wikipedia says “About 6,000 species in 200 genera have been described…” Good luck.
Yeah. Matt asked me for a species name when I sent him the shot and I had to think: *You must be kidding.*
But I could easily place an even bet that there’s entomologists who could identify the genus and give candidate species off the top of their head.
Oh yeah, that’s the glassy-winged vasebutt fly!
Post a pic or a link to BugGuide.Net. You’ll get an answer pretty quickly, if my experience is typical.
Best I can do is that it’s subfamily Syrphinae, but there are many species that are nearly identical. The picture lacks details needed to use the key I found, but it may be that the abdominal markings are diagnostic.
Nice picture, and my favorite family of flies.
OK. Now I know that the internet officially has a site for everything.
You’re surprised that there’s a website dedicated to the single most numerous and diverse group of animals?
My guess is toxomerus marginatus. But i don’t really trust myself identifying random bugs down to species especially from a photo.
Many thanks! I Googled Toxomerus marginatus and found this. The 7th picture (on the pale violet background) looks convincingly like Mr. Goebel’s photograph. Some of the other bugs are engaging in activities of a highly biological nature.
Well, its a guess. I’d post the photo on BugGuide.net and see what others say
Well, yeah.
Especially seeing as none of them can type, nor do any of them have credit cards with which to buy online porn ( Which, frankly, would be fascinating in it’s own right. I suddenly got a really bizarre image of the bluebottle fly version of “Two Girls, One Cup”. )
“2 Girls 1 Cup” is for schoolchildren. You want “1 man 1 jar”.
(role playing)
No wonder most people don’t learn anything when you “Darwinists” teach biology. Just give “us” equal time. In our “theory” there’s only one bug “kind.” We promise not to have students critically analyze whether the bug “kind” was on the ark or flew above it.
Or is that “DarLOSEists?”
As a horticulturalist, I deal with genus and species of plants all the time. Even more specific with variety and cultivar. I took a basic entomology university class and we rarely got past family which surpised the heck out of me–until I realized just how many species there are and how hard it can be to identify them. I love taxonomy and find the names enlightening and fun, but insects are so much harder than plants.
In case anyone’s interested, my favorite plant name is Chamaecyparis pisifera ‘Filifera Aurea Nana’. It’s a great plant and it’s name is just so fun to say.
Scientific names can be extraordinarily sonorous. Years ago I came across the phrase “the polyplacophoran mollusk, Lepidochitona cinereus” in an invertebrate biology textbook and realized it could have a line in the Aeneid.
One of the better known of Isaac Asimov’s science essays was titled “You, Too, Can Speak Gaelic”. Being a chemist, he was amused to find that the chemical “paradimethylaminobenzaldehye” could actually be fit into the tune “The Irish Washerwoman”, a classic jig. He was idly singing this while he was on business someplace and a woman said to him: “Oh, you know it in the original Gaelic!”
Y’know, if you keep saying that over and over until you get fluid at it, it DOES sort of sound like a jig.
It’s funny that in this context, that’s an incredibly beautiful creature. But if I was sniffing a flower and got a face full of it, I’d swat at it in disgust. Not as bad as the time I was smelling a rose and an earwig came out of it, but still…
So I guess what I’m saying is, don’t smell the roses. They’ve got bugs on them.
A gent named John A. Carroll wrote five stanzas, and called the result THE CHEMIST’S DRINKING SONG. Take it away, John!
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde, Sodium citrate, ammonium cyanide, Mix ‘em together and add some benzene, And top off the punch with trichloroethylene.
Got gassed up last night with some furfuryl alcohol, Followed it up with a gallon of propanol, Tanked up on hydrazine ’til after noon, Then spit on the floor and blew up the saloon.
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde, Powdered aluminum, nitrogen iodide, Chlorates, permanganates, nitrates galore, Just swallow one drink and you’ll never need more.
Whiskey, tequila, and rum are too tame. No, the stuff that I drink must explode into flame, When I breathe and dissolve all the paint in the room, And rattle the walls in a ground-shaking boom.
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde, Go soak your head in a good strong insecticide, Slosh it around and impregnate your brain, With dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane.
Aaagh! HTML fail – at least the line breaks should be fairly obvious…
That’s a filk song written as a take off from an Isaac Asimov essay in _The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction_ (aka F&SF). (And, by the way, filk is no longer a typo.)
–W. H. Heydt
Old Used Programmer
I used to like to listen to Asimov the few times I heard him on the radio. He had a deep voice, and an accent that clearly identified him as “a good Joosh boy from da Bronx.”
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