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Photo#179268
Syrphid Fly - Sphiximorpha willistoni - male

Syrphid Fly - Sphiximorpha willistoni - Male
Sand Springs, Osage County, Oklahoma, USA
April 27, 2008
Size: 9.52mm (3/8")
Please help with ID.

Images of this individual: tag all
Syrphid Fly - Sphiximorpha willistoni - male Syrphid Fly - Sphiximorpha willistoni - male

Not wasp.
This syrphid fly would be happy to know that you mistook it for a wasp! That is the whole point of its mimicry, of course. Maybe one of our fly experts can give you a genus, as I know our syrphid guide pages are overflowing! Great images.

 
Wow.
Nice pic. That's one amazing potter wasp mimic fly!

I believe this is Sphiximorpha willistonii.

Great addition to the two guide references here:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/57861

 
....
When it looks so much like a wasp how can you tell it's a syrphid (just for my own knowledge) ? It doesn't look like the typical syrphids I'm used to seeing.

Now that I look closer I do see the yellow halteres....

 
Syrphid
In photos, I can often see the halteres more easily than I can see that there are only two wings. Wasps and bees have little velcrolike hooks that hold the forewings and hindwings together, so you often can't see that detail well. But halteres are a dead giveaway--if you can see them.

The syrphid guess on the page I reference below was based on the spurious vein, which is clear here. Here's a bugguide page:

And here's a page from my site.

By the way, those bicolored wings look suspiciously like mimics of this group of wasps, which fold their forewings longitudinally:


The whole issue of mimicry is fascinating and complex.

(Actually, I meant to post this comment on this page:

I'll leave it on both, unless an editor suggests deleting one.)

 
How to tell.
There are several ways you can spot a mimic. In this case, from just the photo, you can easily see that there is only one set of wings (true wasps have two sets - the second set smaller); what I noticed, however, before the wings, was the eyes that were much more enlarged and wrapped around the head compared to the normal potter wasp, and the antennae were also different in that potter wasp antennae are more segmented.

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