Eremoides bicristatus (Banks, 1924); or, Here be Dragons...

This was going to be a post about a fly (order Diptera, I mean), as I've rather neglected them. But as I doodled around, looking for a key to Afrotropical Promachus, I remembered something significantly more bizarre.

This:

Photographed in Chongwe, Lusaka, Zambia in October 2011, using Olympus E-420 DSLR, Zuiko 40-150mm lens and 3 KOOD magnifiers. Note the bizarre little 'wings' projecting from its thorax.

I can't find the Chewa name for this delightful insect, so we'll just launch straight into what it is in English; this is an Owlfly, a family closely related to the Antlions, which you may remember from this post about Hagenomyia tristis.

One of the downsides to this truly awesome group of insects is that there isn't a great deal of information on them, particularly the African groups, online. The most comprehensive I found was the Lacewing Digital Library, from which I was able to glean which species were recorded in the region - one of which had a distinctly promising name, and one unreferenced image on Flickr seemed promising, but wasn't enough to go on.
It occurred to me today that I might have better luck with the Royal Museum for Central Africa's Illustrated Database of Neuroptera, which, in an ambitious and reasonably user-friendly project, does have a surprising number of images of types either hosted or linked to.

But it didn't have images of the species with such a promising name. All it had was the name, a list of museums where specimens are held (which would be useful if I had access to them) and the original citation.

That part is important. You see, although most (all?) prestigious journals require a subscription before their most recent articles can be viewed, a man called Banks submitted an article to the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparitive Zoology at Harvard College back in the 1920s, and, some time after they published it, it was made freely available, with the entire issue it was published in, on the Biodiversity Heritage Library [link].

With that realisation, it didn't take long to find the original description for that teasingly close name. And it fit. And there was a diagram of a particularly distinctive feature of the newly described genus Erophanes, and it was only a few more clicks to discover that Erophanes, under its new name of Eremoides (Erophanes was already taken) has only one species. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Eremoides bicristatus

(Banks, 1924)

Same time, same place, but with Olympus E-420 and Zuiko 40-150mm lens and no magnifiers.

We'll call it the Two-Crested Owlfly for now, a literal attempt to translate that into Chewa as kawiri-matsumba kadzidzi-mbebe (lit. 'twice-crests owl-fly'), but I'm tempted to use Kadzidzi-Tombolombo instead, meaning owl-dragonfly, as mbebe, unlike the English 'fly', is not all that general, and refers quite specifically to the houseflies and similar insects.The owl-flies live - and look - more like the (quite unrelated) dragonflies, and so it seems a more sensible name.

All that aside, and onwards with the taxonomy:

- Ascalaphini     

- Ascalaphinae    

- Ascalaphidae     

- Myrmeleontoidea

See also Hagenomyia tristis.

- Myrmeleontiformia

- Neuroptera              

- Neuropterida            

- Endopterygota           

See also Dichtha inflata, Oedemera nobilis, Otiorhynchus atroapterus,Malachius bipustulatus , Phyllobius pomaceus, Cheilomenes lunata, Melolontha melolontha, Neojulodis vittipennis, Demetrias atricapillus, Anthia fornasinii, Lophyra cf. differens, Synagris proserpina, Vespula germanica, Astata tropicalis, Anthophora furcata, Andrena nigroaenea, Zebronia phenice, Crambus pascuella, Nemophora degeerella, Sphinx ligustri, Laelia robusta, Acada biseriata, Metisella willemi, Anthocharis cardamines, Papilio demodocus, Panorpa germanica, Chloromyia formosa, Senaspis haemorrhoa, Helophilus pendulus, Episyrphus balteatus, Metadon inermis, Diasemopsis meigenii, Dolichotachina caudata and Megistocera filipes.

- Eumetabola                  

See also Pephricus, Grypocoris stysi, Ranatra and Anoplocnemis curvipes. 

- Neoptera                        

See also Idolomantis dentifrons, Sibylla pretiosa, Tettigonia viridissima, Stictogryllacris punctata, Enyaliopsis, Humbe tenuicornis, Lobosceliana loboscelis, Cyathosternum prehensile, Heteropternis thoracica and Pseudothericles jallae.

- Metapterygota                 

See also Enallagma cyathigerum, Pseudagrion hageni, Lestinogomphus angustus and Rhyothemis semihyalina. 

- Pterygota                           

- Dicondylia                          

- Insecta                                 

- Hexapoda                             

- Arthropoda                            

See also Phrynarachne rugosa, Hyllus argyrotoxus, Enoplognatha ovata, Argiope bruennichi, Pardosa amentata, Alopecosa barbipes,  Dicranopalpus ramosus and Ligia oceanica.

- Ecdysozoa                               

- Protostomia                              

See also Burtoa nilotica.

- Nephrozoa                                  

See also Caprimulgus pectoralis, Tockus alboterminatus, Larus argentatus, Sterna hirundo, Burhinus vermiculatus, Troglodytes troglodytes, Megaceryle maxima, Ardea goliath, Chalcophaps indica, Stigmatopelia senegalensis, Lygodactylus capensis, Thelotornis capensis, Zootoca vivipara, Trachylepis varia, Trachylepis striata wahlbergi, Hipposideros vittatus, Syncerus caffer, Rana temporaria, Breviceps poweri, Chiromantis xerampelina and Synchiropus splendidus. 

- Bilateralia                                     

- Eumetazoa                                     

- Animalia                                          

- Eukaryota                                         

And here's a rather shoddier picture of a female, just to be leaving you with:

 

And that's all, folks!







Two sites were of particular value in the identification of this species - first, the Lacewing Digital Library, from where I deduced the species with appropriate ranges, and then the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which allows free access to an astounding number of back-issues of major journals. But is currently hiccuping. Which may just be my computer.

Astata tropicalis, Arnold, 1924

I won't go into great lengths about the difficulties in identifying African insects that are neither Mediterranean nor South African. Instead I will open with a picture.

First off, let me say that this stout, fuzzy, big-eyed little character is a male bee-wolf. Bee wolf is always a bit of an odd name, as the insects described are neither wolves nor bees, but rather a group of 'wasps' that prey upon specific genera or species of bee.

In this particular case, which I have convinced myself is a male of Astata tropicalis, the name 'Bee-Wolf' is a bit of a misnomer, as the prey are usually spider hunting wasps (of the Pompiliidae, quite possibly the most attractive bunch of insects to leave me at a complete loss where identification is concerned). The term 'Digger wasp' or 'Sphecoid' is also employed occasionally, but I would typically use 'Digger wasp' for the Sphecidae, and 'Sphecoid' refers to a superfamily (Sphecoidea) which doesn't exist any more, as it has been merged with the bees in the Apoidea (largely because the various wasps of the Sphecoidea were in many cases more closely related to bees than to one another).

Some entomologists employ the clades 'Spheciformes' and 'Anthophila' to keep track of what in the Apoidea is and isn't a bee, but this merely repeats the problems seen in the two superfamilies - the only real distinction between the bees, in the monophyletic (=phylogenetically valid) Anthophila and the paraphyletic (=phylogenetically beyond Iffy and into the great beyond of phylogenetically useless, like the words 'Fish' and 'Invertebrate') Spheciformes is that the Anthophila are herbivorous.

To put this into context, it's like treating pandas on their own as a clade equivalent to the seals, bears, dogs, cats, raccoons and weasels, on the basis that Pandas are (mostly) herbivorous, despite them clearly being bears.

Fortunately, there is a solution: we can call it a Crabronid. Until Crabronidae becomes a superfamily, which, seeing as the Anthophila are in fact nested within it, and then we'll probably call it an Astatid (=member of the theoretically soon-to-be-defined family Astatidae)

Now that we've brought back the long lost pre-amble, let's have a gander at the phylogeny:

I've already disclosed that I believe - reasonably firmly, hence no cf, that this is

Astata tropicalis 

Arnold, 1924

which belongs to the: 

- Astatinae

- Crabronidae

(skipping over the popular but meaningless 'Spheciformes') - Apoidea           

- Aculeata             

- Apocrita                 

- Hymenoptera             

- Hymenopterida             

- Endopterygota                 

- Eumetabola                         

- Neoptera                                  

- Metapterygota                              

- Pterygota                                           

- Dicondylia                                              

- Insecta                                                        

- Hexapoda                                                        

- Arthropoda                                                         

- Ecdysozoa                                                              

- Protostomia                                                               

- Bilateralia                                                                     

- Eumetazoa                                                                       

- Animalia                                                                              

- Eukaryota                                                                                 

And, beyond heading into a rather iffy breakdown of the relationships between life and near-life, and then organic molecules, chemicals generally and eventually just plain old matter, that's all, folks.