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Austin, Travis County, Texas, USA

Is this M. fisherae?



And is this one M. unipunctata?



I'm not familiar with the genus. I figured the latter one by the spots on the wings, but maybe that's not diagnostic. The other one is just a guess.

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Where is the material from?

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Both Mycetophila fisherae and M. unipunctata lack anterodorsal bristles on the hind tibia.

Laffoon, Jean L. 1957. A revision of the Nearctic species of Fungivora (Diptera, Mycetophilidae). Iowa State College Journal of Science 31(2):141-340.

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Sorry. This is from Austin, Travis County, Texas, USA.

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Thanks. Is this source available online?

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https://lib.dr.ia...ol31/iss2/

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So I should be calling these Fungivora?

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Fungivora is an old name for Myceophila, along with Tendipes for Chironomus and several more. There was a 50 year long dispute among entomologists over whether to use names from an early version of Meigen's classification of Diptera published in 1800 or different names from the final version published in 1803. In the 1960s the authorities decided to use the 1803 names.

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I was reading through the paper to understand what the anterodorsal bristles are. It says, "The mid and hind tibiae bear a number of stout bristles arranged in longitudinal rows (Figs. 7, 8). Starting with the dorsal row and moving counterclockwise around the left tibia as seen from the distal aspect, these bristles are referred to as the dorsals, anterodorsals, anteriors, ventrals, and posteriors. The latter are weaker than the others." Counterclockwise around the left tibia to me is easier to interpret as outward dorsally around to inward ventrally. That way it applies to both sides. Unfortunately, the illustration has a leg unconnected to the body, so the question of which ones are the dorsal row is unclear. I think if the legs are held back, the dorsal ones are the dorsal ones, i.e., sticking straight up. The anterior ones would be the ones sticking out. If the legs are held out, the anterior ones would be pointing forward. So the anterodorsal bristles would be between these two rows.

If I'm interpreting this correctly, then I don't see anterodorsal bristles on either of my photos. Rather, I see a row of dorsals and a row of anteriors.

I assume the setulae are just the smaller hairs, and on my photos are nearly in line with the dorsal bristles, just barely closer to the body. Am I identifying these hairs correctly?

By the way, I used an online service to convert the linked document to a searchable one. Is that something that can be uploaded here? It's an 18 MB searchable PDF file.

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From what I can see the online document is already serachable. At least, it is when I view it online...

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For orientation, see the glossay, for example anterodorsal or ad. It looks as if neither of you specimens has ad setae. The top one probably would fall into the Mycetophila fungorum group, the bottom one in the Mycetophila ruficollis group. The former was revised by Chandler in 1993 (I think all genitalia jobs). Not sure about the latter, but European species of the ruficollis group are very similar and also require genital dissection for reliable ID.

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You're right. It is searchable. I wonder why I got the idea it wasn't. I only went to the effort of generating a searchable version using OCR because searches weren't working. Oh, well.

Thanks for the additional identification suggestions.


BTW, I don't think an illustration of intersecting cylinders clarifies things because the limbs rotate and move back and forth. Put another way, I know ad bristles are between anterior bristles and dorsal bristles, but which ones are which? John Carr's original comment that fisherae and unipunctata both lack ad bristles on hind tibiae had me originally thinking that was an objection to those identifications based on those bristles being apparent in the photos. So I thought I was looking at ad bristles there, and I was trying to figure how that could be. That's why I posted later that I thought they did not have ad bristles. I guess I jumped to a conclusion reading something from John Carr that was not actually there.