---

Dear Nikita,

your main reason is surely an interesting point of view. At present I see two similar species of Sciomyza in Europe and accept dryomyzina and testacea as their valid names. These species are not easy to separate, especially their females, based on the characters given in recent keys. Vala's book is in most parts not more then an evalutation of literature and in too many cases not really helpful for determination of rare respectively difficult species.

I now picked out four females of Sciomyza, two of them I would place to testacea and two I see as dryomyzina, which have exact the same coloration of legs as Hans specimen. Of these I made some fast shots of heads in frontal and in lateral view. Associated with the „black“ or „yellow“ color of third antennal segment you can hopefully see that there is a pair of specimens with a broad head, short face and low gena and a group with a higher head, much more produced face and higher eyes and gena etc.

The problem is that the keys are fixed on coloration of antenna and descriptions on leg color. Both species seems to be variable in these characters, possibly the reason to conclude that there is only one species. Nearly all specimens I have seen of dryomyzina have the third antennal segment darkened dorsally, orange-brow to blackish, sometimes mostly darkened and only the base yellow. Several testacea I have examined have the 3rd segmend black but the base yellow ventrally. With my small material I would say that the female of dryomyzina has always the base of arista orange and the 3rd antennal might be darkened dorsally as in Hans specimen. In testacea the female has usually the 3rd segment blackish for most parts and the base of arista black. Thats the reason why I'm tending to say Hans specimen is belonging to dryomyzina. Both species have typical characters located at the head which are not visible on Hans pictures.

Regards

Piet