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Photo#727145
A 'classic' Cylindromyia pose - Cylindromyia intermedia - male

A 'classic' Cylindromyia pose - Cylindromyia intermedia - Male
Rose Valley Rd, Los Padres National Forest, Ventura County, California, USA
July 9, 2010
Found nectaring on flowers of Eriogonum fasciculatum.

This seems like a popular "compositional" motif for Cylindromyia...



The last two thumbnails above have the same abdominal pattern as my post here.

Images of this individual: tag all
A 'classic' Cylindromyia pose - Cylindromyia intermedia - male A 'classic' Cylindromyia pose - Cylindromyia intermedia - male

Moved
Moved from Cylindromyia.

Probably Cylindromyia intermedia
Most (if not all) of these California Cylindromyia with very red abdomens are intermedia.

 
Thanks John
I tried to run this through the key in Aldrich(1). In my photos, I could only make out (the glistening bases of) a single pair of (long) scutellar bristles attached at the apical corners of the scutellum. But that would lead to C. dosiades, which is described as having abdomen with red on the sides and a "rather wide median black stripe" perhaps like the posts below:

     

But mine has a solid red band on most of T1 with just a small median black "nub" pushing in anteriorly, like in the posts below:

     

So I guess mine isn't C. dosiades, and I just can't see the shorter crossing pair of scutellar bristles on the apical edge of the scutellum (as illustrated in Fig. 16 of Aldrich). If I presume there are two pairs of scutellar bristles, then I do get to C. intermedia when I continue in the key.

If you are confident this is indeed C. intermedia feel free to move the post.

I couldn't find any posts where the decussate inner apical pair of scutellar bristles are discernible...which would allow one to directly verify that first step in Aldrich's key. But, as I mentioned above, C. dosiades can apparently be eliminated when a medial black stripe isn't present on the abdomen, in which case one could continue through the key...presuming there aren't other species described since 1926 that the key might not include. Seems to me that, up to synonymy, nearly all the species in the catalog list here are included in Aldrich(1926)...except for C. alticola, C. mirabilis, and C. signatipennis, with the last being the only one listed as occurring in CA. So I guess if that last species can be ruled out, this is likely C. intermedia.

Aldrich(1) states that Cylindromyia intermedia is the only species in the genus with hind basitarsus villous on the flexor side in males. Unfortunately a villous basitarsus wasn't clear to me in any the posts I perused except the one below:

 

...but it looks to me like the basitarsus is villous on the *extensor* side there, rather than the flexor side (= sides touching when joint is fully bent).

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