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body 7.5mm. found in on Feb. 10, 2022 in a developed area of Maryland north of Washington DC.

A rather beaten-up female muscid ID'd to Muscina using the Manual of the Nearctic Diptera. I tried the keys in Huckett's 1975 paper on the Muscidae of California and Snyder's 1955 paper on Muscina and Dendrophaonia. The best fit appears to be Muscina levida as described in Huckett and I think I can rule out the other 6 species of Nearctic Muscina for a variety of reasons. Huckett's description of M. levida encompasses a wider range of characteristics than does Snyder's (e.g. in the color of the 2nd and 3rd antennal segments).

The ID problem appears to be due, at least in part, to this individual fly having characteristics that don't neatly fit in the character states of either key (e.g., the 3rd antennal segment is neither "reddish" or "black" but rather tan with a touch of gray; the 2nd antennal segment is neither "fulvous" or "mainly fuscous" but is rather grayish with some tan at its distal end, etc.). The other part of the problem is probably me...

I could clearly use some help here. Thanks in advance!

Regards
Steve







dorsal view, right wing










1st abdominal sternite


lateral edge of scutellum


view of hind coxae looking towards anterior showing that the coxae lack bristles on their posterior surface

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Steve, Misha Esin (here esinM) and I presently work on Muscina.
So far we have a lot of unsolved questions with Palaearctic material.
As far as we will came to solutions, we write our opinion on your specimen (Presently we have doubts about identity. Yes, by Snyder's key it seems to me that it runs to levida.)

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Hi Nikita,
Many thanks for commenting on this one. I've changed the title of the post and will add your comments to my BugGuide post. I'm looking forward to seeing your revision of the genus

Best wishes
Steve