Diptera - Lonchopteridae

I managed a brief check of fallen Sycamore leaves this morning, searching for overwintering hoverfly larva (see this post from last January), but soon quit in the face of torrential sideways rain. It's meant to pass through in the next couple of hours, I may hurry back out there if it does.

The only thing that caught my eye was this 2mm beastie

This larva is from a family of flies known as Spear-winged Flies, the Lonchopteridae, genus Lonchoptera. There are only seven species known to occur in Britain, though realistically only three of them are likely to occur this far north. One of these three is Lonchoptera lutea, which I recorded from this site last year. Unfortunately, the larvae aren't identifiable to species - they need to be bred through. I popped this one back into the leaf litter. I took a video clip of one grazing the meniscus of a wet leaf last year, click on the link above and scroll down to view it.

I'm finding it a bit frustrating not being able to progress various dipteran finds beyond family level. So far this year (all eleven days of it...) I've named three flies to species level and have three more that I can't do anything with. Plus this larva. Yesterday's chironomid midge will forever remain nameless, I'm sure. But the two Mycetophila specimens may someday be named to species. Especially if I wave them at Peter Chandler.

C'mon rain, hurry up and pass through!


[Later that afternoon...]


The rain did pass, and I headed back into the woods to resume my leaf litter searches. Disappointingly, I failed to find any hoverfly larvae though I did find many Tipulidae (cranefly) larvae amongst moist leaves, particularly in the wet film between two leaves stuck together. I also found these larger cranefly larvae, all the other larvae I found were solitary and much smaller.

Not sure if they're responsible for the skeletonising of these leaves or not

Very little else to be found. I did spy an adult fly, perched up on a plastic container blown in from the sheep fields just upslope of the woods. I managed these two record shots before figuring I'd better tube it up. That's when it flew off, never to be seen again, how very annoying! It had the look of a scathophagid, but it's not quite right for that.

And a massive crop, just in case anybody can clue me in

Can't quite make out the wing venation, but head shape and the hind tarsal segments look distinctive

EDIT - it's Sphaeroceridae (the Lesser Dungflies) - found it by going through Stuart Ball's 'Diptera family key'. Sweet, limited progress has been made! Quite possibly Lotophila atra (known from Skye) but will need to key a specimen to make further progress.

I'm off work tomorrow too, however I have a WeBS Count to do and I've just checked the weather forecast. The weather station is about quarter of a mile from here, so it's likely to be pretty accurate

The blurb says "Heavy showers changing to sleet showers by late morning." I think I ought to have done my WeBS count today, dammit.