---

Host plant: Carduus assoanus
Date: yesterday
Weather: hot and warm, not windy
Size: big for an Urophora, maybe 6-7 mm
Location: Perdiguera, Monegros region, Zaragoza, NE Spain
Habitat: abandoned wheat field and steppes in gypsy soil

for sure Valery you know the species :)
Thanks

---

:-(

---

Looks like Urophora mauritanca Mcq. Oviscape is too long for U. solstitialis, which lives on Carduus. It's only visiting this plant.

---

Thanks Valery!
Only visiting, really? Bit there was various of them, males and females in separated thistles... not many individuals, but none of them in other than thistles.

---

Dear Isidro: ID of Urophora by pictures always a sort of guess. However, my observations show that Urophora species often are lekking on an improper plant if their own plant is not flowering yet. They feed, but normally neither copulate nor oviposite, and then move to their host plant.

One of the few exclusions are Urophora terebrans and probably U. tenuis, which seem to shift between several genera of Cardueae plants (Onopordum, Cirsium, Cynara, Arctium) when there are no properly developed flower heads of a better host. However, no shifting between hosts have been ever recorded for U. mauritanica.

I leave a little chance that it is not a mauritanica, but to be sure, I must see the aculeus tip under a big magnification.

---

Wow, that is an amazing interesting info! The biology of flies poorly known, thanks for add this great point Valery.
I'll let as mauritanica then! Thanks again, Isidro