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Photo#268685
Mantidfly - Leptomantispa pulchella

Mantidfly - Leptomantispa pulchella
Mobile (Dog River), Mobile County, Alabama, USA
April 23, 2009
Impressive equipment.

Images of this individual: tag all
Mantidfly - Leptomantispa pulchella Mantidfly - Leptomantispa pulchella

Moved
Moved from Dicromantispa sayi.

Moved

 
Leptomantispa pulchella, methinnks
According to Aaron's discussion here:


To me, Robert's detail image shows characters of the pronotum (smoothness, setae uniformly along the length, not in tufts as in D. sayi) characteristic of L. pulchella. (Hard to know on those setae!) Additional suggestive, not definitive, characters:
-large dark bar across top of head
-unicolored antennae (D. sayi can show this, but tricolored antennae, if present, are sufficient to indicate D. sayi, but they are not always present!)

 
Yes, Patrick, I agree...this is Leptomantispa
The diagnostic character for Leptomantispa of uniformly distributed setae ("hairs") on the pronotum is apparent in the detail image above.

Also, though it's very easy to confuse D. sayi and L. pulchella, a number of other subtle characters also support the latter here: e.g. uniformly dark antennae (in conjunction with southern US location); relatively smooth upper edge of pronotum; relatively(!) sparse wing venation; "jumbled" mottling of yellow & brown spots on the mid and rear coxae (vs. the usually less jumbled mottling of D. sayi with typically more "horizontal bars"). All these point to L. pulchella here.

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