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Photo#120071
three's a crowd. - Ogcodes incultus - male - female

three's a crowd. - Ogcodes incultus - Male Female
Weldon Spring, St. Charles County, Missouri, USA
September 23, 2006
Found these three together. Need help with an ID.

Images of this individual: tag all
three's a crowd. - Ogcodes incultus - male - female three's a crowd. - Ogcodes incultus - male - female

Wonderful find and photos...unusual and valuable too!
Outside the genus Eulonchus, there seem to be very few images captured of acrocerids in copula. [Eulonchus are exceptional in this regard because they're much larger and more active than most other acrocerids, and they frequently visit and mate in flowers...making them generally more conspicuous to photographers.]

Getting in copula shots is especially useful for acrocerids because there is widespread sexual dimorphism throughout the family...not just in size (as is fairly common elsewhere as well) but particularly in color patterning and morphology (e.g. presence of lack of costal teeth in Pterodontia). Males and females of the same species can look so different that in the past many were initially described as different taxa!

So it's great to have both sexes present in an image to provide more info and help avoid confusion (three's even better, to help gauge variability!)

All that said, in the instance here there doesn't appear to be much dimorphism (or variation in the males)...except that the males are smaller in size than the female. But that size difference is common, especially in Acroderidae, where the females are often loaded with many thousands of eggs!

Images cropped
The image files previously posted here contained a lot of uninformative green leaf area and background air, and were much larger than maximum of 560 x 560 pixels for unscaled display on BugGuide. Image files larger than 560 x 560 are automatically scaled down in size to within 560 x 560 by the BugGuide software when viewed by all visitors except BG editors and the photo's contributor. This can significantly reduce the magnification and detail visible to most people.

But the portion of the image files actually showing the acrocerids were sufficiently less than 560 x 560 so that they could cropped to within 560 x 560 without significantly compromising the composition or reducing the magnification for the acrocerids. So I performed the crops, and reposted the images as currently seen.

Moved
Moved from Ogcodes.

Moved
Moved from Small-headed Flies.

Ogcodes
They're in the genus Ogcodes, but you can't see enough characters to give a definitely species.

 
After further review of the p
After further review of the pictures and Cole's treatise on the genus I've come to the conclusion that these match in all characters to Ogcodes incultus. The key character most readily noted are the heavily infuscated wings.

 
Dennis...Is this name current?
Recently I've been studying Acroceridae, and reading the paper(s) you recommended to me long ago by Sabrosky (1944, 1948), as well as Cole's earlier work and Ev Schlinger's 1960 revision of Ogcodes. (See "Printed References" on the genus info page for links for free downloads of the Cole and Schlinger refs.)

At any rate, I noticed that both Sabrosky (1944,1948) and Schlinger (1960) subsumed O. incultus into synonymy with O. pallidipennis (considering the former an unusual melanistic form of the latter).

However, the MCZ pages list both names (with images): O. incultus and O. pallidipennis...and they certainly do appear distinct, at least superficially. Was there a later paper that resurrected O. incultus? Or do you simply prefer to post them separately to indicate the extreme of variation within O. pallidipennis that was formerly recognized as O. incultus?

Acroceridae.
A pair of males, and one big female, of a small-headed fly in the family Acroceridae. That is a great find, as these flies tend to be rather scarce and not often observed. The larvae are parasites of spiders.

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