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Photo#17189
Brachyleptura champlaini - Brachyleptura brevis - male

Brachyleptura champlaini - Brachyleptura brevis - Male
Londonderry, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, USA
July 25, 2004
ID based on comparison with image and description in Yanega's Field Guide to Northeastern Longhorned Beetles.

Brachyleptura pages
are set up for your pics.

 
Thank you Tom.
Is that something I should be doing (but don't know how yet), or do you need special clearance to create pages?

 
Contributing editors
Only contributing editors can create pages, move somebody else's images and a few other things. If you feel that you know a lot about some group talk to Troy and he can make you an editor. There is so much work with all the new images that keep coming that we need all the help that we can get.
It always helps to mention your sources, how you arrived at the ID.

 
Jim McClarin, Contributing Editor
I was knighted a few weeks back, but don't know yet how to get into my shining armor.

All my longhorns are IDed out of Douglas Yanega's book. I'll so note here.

 
Guidelines
Troy gave some guidelines here and there, for instance http://bugguide.net/node/view/13248. Go thru the: Website problems and suggestions forums and you'll find them.

 
Thank you Beatriz.
I'll poke around and find some answers.

 
Could this be B. vagans
Check out the comments under photo 26026. This beetle has very interesting elytra that don't exactly match Yanega's description for either species. However, when catagorizing the dark and light markings, I think they may be closer to extensive pale areas with a dark suture (i.e. vagans) than entirely dark but with a thin lateral band (i.e. champlaini). This IS confusing. I think that Tom Murray has a nice series of the different color forms of vagans (26024-26027) and that Robin McLeod has a nice photo that shows the thin lateral band of what I think is champlaini (12778) but then check out the Cedar Creek image of vagans which I am postulating is misidentified? (Anyone who knows how to do links please feel free to help me out here!).

 
I'm posting more pix
These are of other individuals in the same batch that I assumed were all variants of the same species. Unfortunately, with the techniques and equipment I employed at the time, none show enough pronotal detail to analyze the punctuation, which would have been the best way to tell which of the two species they are.

specimen a
specimen b
specimens a, c & d

btw, in order to post thumbnails, follow this example. (Mine is deactivated by substituting the code &#*091 -take out asterisk- for the first bracket.)

[thumb:26026]

To post links, use this example, using, of course, the url of the page you want the link to go to in place of the one I used in the example:

[url=http://bugguide.net/comment/edit/33727]horsefeathers[/url]

 
Intermediate forms
Do you remember the problem I had separating certain specimens of Anelaphus villosus and parallelus...you know the hell of uncertainty and all that. Well here we go again! I think that most of the photos in this series are champlaini but I just am not sure about this one and also specimen a. There seem to be intermediate gradations between (to paraphrase Yanega) "mostly dark with a lateral orange/pale band" and "having extensive orange/pale markings but with dark elytral sutures". I wonder if we could get Yanega to look at some of these photos. Maybe we really do need to see the hind tibia in the males and the pronotal punctures in the females to be sure.

 
How about a voucher?
I might actually have one. I'm going through my alcohol-preserved specimens this winter, photographing those I never got around to shooting while they were alive. I'm finding that the small longhorns are most likely to get torn apart in the jumble, but I'll keep my eye out for one or more of these and just maybe ...

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