Afrosyrphus schmuttereri
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Arthropoda
- Class: Insecta
- Order: Diptera
- Family: Syrphidae
- Genus: Afrosyrphus
- Species: Afrosyrphus schmuttereri
Visual Description
Afrosyrphus schmuttereri is a robust, pilose (hairy) species of flower fly.[2] Observations from the TreeOfLife-200M dataset reveal that the species possesses extremely long, slender antennae and exhibits obscure abdominal markings.[1],[2]
Biology and Ecology
Afrosyrphus schmuttereri is a species described from Kenya and Uganda, where it was previously misidentified as A. varipes.[2] The species is typically found in forest margins, canopy gaps in lower montane cloud forests, and ruderal habitats with tall herb vegetation.[2]
The larvae are aphidophagous, feeding on various aphid species including Brevicoryne brassicae, Macrosiphum rosae, and Myzus persicae.[2] They have a broad, strongly flattened body that changes from greenish-yellow to brownish before pupation.[2] Mature larvae can enter a state of quiescence, which may assist in surviving dry seasons.[2]
Gallery
References
- 1 2 Dataset view for Animalia / Arthropoda / Insecta / Diptera / Syrphidae / Afrosyrphus / schmuttereri constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Ximo Mengual; Axel Ssymank; Jeffrey H. Skevington; Menno Reemer; Gunilla Ståhls. The genus Afrosyrphus Curran (Diptera, Syrphidae), with a description of a new species. European Journal of Taxonomy. 2020. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2020.635.