Myathropa florea

[AndrewC]

I've been working with a Myathropa florea today.

Technical: El-Nik 50mm and 80mm reversed, stacking with ZS

Subject was "windowsill grade" and cleaned with Ammonia + water in a sonic cleaner then rinsed with Methanol before static drying.

First up is a standard pinned lateral view. You can already see the hair clumping you can get when wet cleaning a subject, made a lot better when rinsing with methanol rather than leaving an aqueous coating to dry but still ...



Next is a head profile. For some reason I took this at a crazy angle so I had to extend the canvas and rotate to make it look better. Couple of interesting things here - you can see the hair clumping from the wetclean, this specimen is several days /weeks old and you can see the compound eye losing its colour, cheeks and face have that interesting silvery hair that is not uncommon in Diptera, and finally Rik's favourite proboscis texture has been easily handled by ZS.



Finally, a close up of the wing base. I've noticed that most Syrphidae that I've looked at have this interesting "fin" projecting up at right angles to the main wing at the base. This was a very deep stack looking down the length of the wing to show the vein structure and then the "fin". ZS handled it with no problems in PMax.

Edit: the fin is an "Alula".



I've got a couple more I'll post tomorrow - "back of the head" (which is why I could not reshoot the head profile) and a haltere.

Enjoy,

Andrew

[Harold Gough]

Finally, a close up of the wing base. I've noticed that most Syrphidae that I've looked at have this interesting "fin" projecting up at right angles to the main wing at the base.

This is clearly an addtional control surface, required for the aerobatic flight performance of these insects. It look analagous to the rudder of an aircraft, exerting sideways force, perhaps vital for hovering.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/04/29/sto ... 080200.htm

I though I'd better check on my suggestion, so:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/200 ... lanes.aspx

Harold

[AndrewC]

Thanks for those links. My own thoughts were that it was probably related to their hovering capability but my own searches hadn't found anything. I even know what it is called now - an Alula

Andrew

[rjlittlefield]

Interesting -- I always like learning new words, or in this case, learning more about one that I had mostly forgotten.

Googling on define: alula finds that the word is also used to describe an additional airfoil on the wings of birds, though in that case on the leading edge.

I had read about this in Dalton's "The Miracle of Flight", but had forgotten it. In birds, the alula

--Rik