Ellychnia californica

the earlier commenter is righ

the earlier commenter is right on all counts; according to the Fender key, and without genitalia, the pronotal configuration is the leading diagnostic character. The specimen showcased has the antebasal lobes on either side of the black stripe, placing it in E. c., whereas the other thumbs w/o the lobes, transplanted to this page, are E. megista

… joeCicero, 16 June, 2012 - 10:21am

Many Thanks, Joe

Don't know if this was the best place to bring up this "californica vs. megista" issue...but I commented here because this post seemed to be where Fender's paper was first introduced on BugGuide, and the image above in this post seemed to well-illustrate the elytral pattern that I presumed to be "typical" of E. californica (based on studying Fender's 1969 paper). Thus this post provided a good reference with which to compare the photos in the thumbnails of my previous comment below...which appeared to better correspond to E. megista.

Based on your expert opinion, I'll make a new guide page for E. megista and move the images listed in my comment below to the new page.

… Aaron Schusteff, 16 June, 2012 - 2:11pm

Misid forum

There is a forum for possible misidentifications: http://bugguide.net/forum/16. I posted a reference to your comment there on Thursday.(1)

… John F. Carr, 16 June, 2012 - 3:11pm

Thanks for the Mis-ID forum tip

And thanks also for posting the reference to my earlier comment there.

I had assumed I'd just lucked out when Joe Cicero responded so quickly to my comment. (I didn't realize that =v= and you were behind-the-scenes "wizard-of-Oz" facilitators for that happy occurrence :-) BugGuide fans have so many little things like that to thank you, =v=, and so many others for.

Anyway, I did some content-fill editing for the new E. megista info page...always nice to add a new taxon on BG.

… Aaron Schusteff, 16 June, 2012 - 7:54pm

Thanks Rick & John

...for making availablity of the 1970 treatment of western Ellychnia by Fender better known and accessible to the BG community :-)

BTW, I just posted a series of E. californica from the Santa Cruz area (CA), and noticed that the last couplet of the key in Fender(1), separating the apparently close E. californica and E. megista, distinguishes the two by noting that E. californica has more divergent inner edges of the pronotal vittae, with a small antebasal lobe...whereas E. megista has more parallel edges and lacks the antebasal lobe (cf. figures 14 and 15 of Plate 1 on 3rd page of Fender(1)). The holotype for E. megista is from Santa Cruz, so I paid special attention to this. Afterwards I checked out the BG posts for E. californica and began to wonder if some of the posts below may actually be E. megista?

I don't have much experience with these guys, but the thumbs above don't seem to have an antebasal lobe...though the edges of the vittae of some of them aren't as parallel as in Fig. 15 of Fender, or the image here. Anyway, it made me wonder. Perhaps I'll email Stephen Luk, and ask him about this possibility.

… Aaron Schusteff, 14 June, 2012 - 5:45pm

Moved

Moved from Diurnal Fireflies. Same comment as for E. hatchi.

Fender's paper is now linked as node 251916; you can type "[ cite : 251916 ]" without the spaces to link to it; links appear as (1).

… John F. Carr, 4 February, 2009 - 5:03pm

I'll see what I can do vis-a-vis ventral tomorrow. As you can see, my photographic technique has a lot of room for improvement.

… Rick Buss, 4 February, 2009 - 6:15pm