Mine was spent failing to convince three-items-or-less customers at the local convenience store not to ask me for a bag. Oh, the glamourous life I live.
Anyway, enough about me - On with the show.
As a post-Earth Day treat, I'll be uploading a few animals only recently photographed, and even more recently identified to species level (I only found out what this one was at 7.40 this morning).
Eukaryota - It has a nuclear membrane, and (usually) cell organelles such as mitochondria (allowing an innovative and widespread delegation of aerobic respiration, reducing the effective toxicity of nasty oxygen).
Animalia - it has multiple cells and, more importantly, isn't a plant, a fungus or any of various Protists.
Eumetazoa - it has tissues. So it can't be a sponge.
Bilateralia - It has two way symmetry - at some point in its life.
Nephrozoa - it possibly isn't a member of several disputed taxa that probably actually belong somewhere within this group... (this is a bit of a redundant clade).
Protostomia - it's not a chordate, an echinoderm or an arrow-headed worm.
Ecdysozoa - It sheds its skin, and isn't a mollusc or a member of a bunch more obscure groups of worms...
Arthropoda - it has a jointed exoskeleton.
Hexapoda - it has six legs.
Insecta - it is an insect.
Dicondylia - not a jumping bristletail...
Pterygota - it has wings!
Metapterygota - it has wings and it's not a mayfly!
Neoptera - it's also not a dragonfly! Exclamation marks can be nauseating!
Eumetabola - it's not a cockroach, grasshopper, stick insect or earwig.
Endopterygota - it undergoes complete metamorphosis. It's not a true bug or a booklouse.
Panorpida - it's not a wasp, beetle or lacewing.
Antliophora - it's not a moth or a caddisfly either.
Diptera - and it's not a scorpionfly... it has two wings, (usually) reduced mouthparts, and relatively short antennae... we'll come back to that bit. It's a true fly.
Nematocera - it has multi-segmented antennae (more than three), and is part of a lineage which includes mosquitoes, march flies, drain flies and the:
Tipulomorpha - the crane flies and their closest relatives.
Tipuloidea - the crane flies (multiple lineages).
Tipulidae - the true crane flies.
Tipulinae - the... really true... crane flies. That bit's not true. It's more "the ones that have turned out to be related to the large european crane-flies", and are therefore grouped in or close to the genus Tipula.
Megistocera filipes filipes
(Fabricius 1805)
.JPG "Megistocera filipes filipes (Fabricius 1805)")
Now, you remember that passing comment I made about flies having short antennae? Well, for males of Megistocera, that's a bit of a fib. Although they don't seem to have more segments in their antennae than other craneflies, their antennae go on... and on... and on... for quite some distance... I didn't actually manage to get a picture which included their entire length without losing focus.
This is the best I can show you:
.JPG "Megistocera filipes filipes (Fabricius 1805)")
This ridiculous oversize serves one very good function (bear in mind that the fly's body isn't far off two centimetres long, the antennae were around five times that) - it makes males of the genus instantly recogniseable (other crane-flies with massively over-extended antennae are found in the Tipulidae, in which they do not typically reach, let alone extend beyond, the tip of the abdomen, and in the Limoniidae, which, while proportionally similar, is a much smaller fly than Megistocera). Better yet, only two species are recognised from the genus, M. filipes in Africa, Asia and Australia, and M. longipennis in the Americas and the Caribbean. At various points, other species (notably M. fuscana) have been described, but have since been regrouped into one of these two species.
Acknowledgements: Identified as Megistocera by diptera.info member John Carr, further identification deduced from the Catalogue of Craneflies of the World, and confirmed by John Carr.
No comments:
Post a Comment