Favoritos de valentyna_and_midgedoctor

These are all images of the same individual at different life stages. It was caught as a larva september 8th, pupated september 14th, and eclosed on september 18th. Found in a tire in a heavily wooded area primaily of decidious trees

A non-native Myocastor coypus (Nutria) covered in a thick coating of an aquatic plant. When I saw it, only its snout was above the water. We saw two dead Nutrias in the water not far away, and wondered if they were choked to death by this aquatic plant, or intentionally killed in the wildlife reserve?

Verry easy to observe from the thermais hotel from where they are unfortunately fed with bread. It is really sad to see the last members of the most majestic freshwater turtle in the Mediterranean becoming pigeons... We also observe them in the nearby rivers where they are much more fearful and dive as soon as they see humans.

Scorpionfly Nannochorista dipteroides, Mount Wellington, Tasmania, November 2017.

A hundred years ago, a Mr Robert John Tillyard, zoologist at the University of Sydney, published a description of an entirely new family of austral scorpionflies, the Nannochoristidae, and designated as the type species one Nannochorista dipteroides, from Hobart and Mount Wellington. The first specimens had been collected the previous year by George Hurlstone Hurdlestone Hardy, a prolific entomologist and, at the time, the acting curator at the Tasmanian Museum. Hardy had found several specimens of an unknown insect while sweep-netting for flies (his speciality) “in a little water-course which flows from the leakage of a portion of the Hobart Waterworks scheme”, off Strickland Avenue, and had sent them to Tillyard for identification. Tillyard “at once wrote and urged him to obtain more”, and describes how Hardy “became fully seized with the importance of his discovery, and spent all his available time in October and November [2016] searching for it”. Nevertheless, by the time Tillyard himself made the trip south in January 2017, “the insects were evidently over”. He and Hardy did, however, find several further up Mount Wellington at The Springs. In all cases, the insects were found by sweeping or beating foliage of vegetation overhanging the water-channel.

Taking my cue from Hardy, I returned to Strickland Falls the weekend before last to see if I could net any Nannochorista. I failed but, becoming “fully seized” with the notion of re-finding the species a century after its discovery, walked to O’Grady’s Falls, a little higher up the same Hobart Rivulet, last weekend. The very first sweep of a small sassafras overhanging the rivulet produced a fine specimen of Nannochorista dipteroides. It was a very flighty insect, and clearly adapted to the cool conditions: even after a spell in the fridge in a plastic container it wouldn’t sit still for long, and the only photo that I managed was this one of it perched on the edge of the container.

Having also described a species of Nannochorista from montane New South Wales in the same paper, Tillyard had a hunch that they might also occur in New Zealand, and raised the possibility with entomologists there. Sure enough, specimens which he allocated to another new genus soon came to light. The idea of plate tectonics, and of the supercontinent of Gondwana, were unknown in Tillyard’s day yet his comments were prescient. He wrote: “the bearing of this discovery upon the Antarctic Theory as advocated by Mr Hedley [Charles Hedley, mollusc expert at the Australian Museum] is obvious…The distribution of this family, so far as at present known, in Tasmania, the Eastern Highlands of Australia, and in New Zealand, can only be explained by dispersal from an original common Antarctic ancestor. If another form belonging to this family were to be found in South Chili or Patagonia, the evidence would be complete; but it seems almost hopeless to expect this region to be well searched for such out-of-the-way insects, for a very long time to come”.

As it turned out, two of the three currently recognised Patagonian species were described only a decade later.