Orange-brown tephritoid-like fly with unmarked wings, blackish abdomen, and brown & white legs - Afrocamilla bispinosa

Moved

Moved from "Acalyptratae".

… John F. Carr, 5 February, 2021 - 3:54pm

Moved

Moved from Flies.

… John S. Ascher, 27 December, 2018 - 9:38am

Moved

Moved from ID Request.

… John F. Carr, 24 December, 2018 - 11:10am

Not Piophilidae

Head and wing are like Drosophilidae but I can't place it into a genus, and the lack of small hairs on the scutum is unusual for that family.

… John F. Carr, 24 December, 2018 - 11:09am

Thanks for your valuable input, John !

I wasn't suspecting Drosophilidae based on habitus/gestalt.
I tried to key it out in Drosophilidae and ended up with the following four genera and one subgenus, in decreasing order of matching with the McAlpin key ONLY:
Drosophilinae:Scaptomyza
Drosophilinae:Cladochaeta [does not match the key nicely]
Drosophilinae:Chymomyza [does not match the key nicely]
Drosophilinae:Drosophila (Scaptodrosophila) [does not match the key nicely]
Steganinae:Trachyleucophenga [does not match the key well at all]

When including other information (i.e. beyond the key) the first four taxa, which all belong to subfamily Drosophilinae, do not appear to match ...
There is not much info on Trachyleucophenga to match to ...
In summary, I agree that none of the (described) Drosophilidae genera appears to match ...
Could it belong in another family ?

… Emile, 24 December, 2018 - 6:43pm

Camillidae

Hi John, John & Emile,

I signed up to BugGuide especially to comment on these photo's!
The direction of Drosophilidae is correct, it is in the same Superfamily: Ephydroidea. The typical speherical scutum with large dorsocentrals, and strong setae antro-ventrally on anterior femur are typical of Camillidae. In the Nearctic there are 4 species known, two Camilla and two Afrocamilla, the former have green thorax and the latter orange. Based on what I can see this should be Afrocamilla bispinosa, described from San Dimos Canyon, Los Angeles, about sixty miles North of where these photo's were taken. As far as I know, no other records beside the single female type exist. The paper describing the species can be found here: https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/16152963#page/755/mode/1up

Kind regards,
Ectemnius

… Ectemnius, 5 February, 2021 - 2:40pm

Already on BugGuide

I already identified one from the Channel Islands but didn't recognize this one.

Now two of the three known records are from BugGuide.

… John F. Carr, 5 February, 2021 - 3:54pm