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This is one of the flies in the family Tachinidae I notice more frequently in my region, located in Petropolis Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I'd like to get identification, to confirm (or not), whether it is a Hystricia abrupta.




Photo #1



Photo #2


Coordinates of the place where I took these photos:
Latitude: -22.531605067567, Longitude: -43.207458257675


Date and time:
December 22, 2006 at 1.07pm GMT+3

More pictures here:

http://www.flickr...amp;m=text

Thanks for help!
AC

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Could be an Adejeania sp. ?
Which one ?

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Very difficult from photos to even get to genus. If you sent me one then I could key it to genus and maybe further with some luck though :) I will have a look at the keys when I get back home.

Nice photos! It has the basic colour and long palps of Adejeania but it looks even more bristly than the ones I have seen and there is something not quite right about it, which is why I think it needs keying properly.

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Hi Chris!

I appreciate your disposal to help me, but I have no idea of how to capture a fly and send it to you, and I know that this is ilegal in Brazil, so, I can't do it, sorry!

I will be waiting you get home and take a look at your keys.
Thank you very much, Chris!
Best regards,
AC

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In the Central American key (by Monty Wood) it keys to Adejeania but this isn't a good indicator ... I would be happier saying that it is "likely to be close to Adejeania" ;)

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I am satisfied with your "likely to be close to Adejeania".
Just to your knowledge, I see this fly almost every day.
Even this morning I took some photos from her.

Thank you, Chris!
Regards,
AC

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Good news :) I would love to be able to work on them more but it is very difficult because there are no comprehensive keys or collections and types are scattered. Very few people in South America are working on them and there are only about 4-5 people in the world working on neotropical tachinids at a high enough level to identify to species. Not to mention the fact that there are undoubtedly many thousand undescribed species and so few people qualified to do the work :)

Really Brazil needs to encourage more people to collect and work on their material because even if we took all the tachinid experts in the world we still wouldn't have enough to make a big dent on the necessary revisions ;)

There are about 3000 species of tachinid described in South America but many of those will be the large species ... and they are very poorly described so it is often impossible to relate the specimen to the description. I have heard estimates of anything between 10000-20000 species of tachinid in South America waiting to be described.

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Your comment was very interesting, Chris.
I am surprised with the number of Tachinid species in South America, waiting to be identified.
Thank you very much!

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In many ways it would be much easier if nobody had named any tachinids in South America and we could just start again. The work that has been done was mostly a long time ago and of very "mixed" quality - a few good workers but a lot of work that we would think of now as very amateurish. They described species completely inadequately - often 1 small paragraph just mentioning a few features that the author thought was significant - no drawings. They held very odd views of what constituted a species or genus so we have a huge number of single-species genera, which adds to the confusion. Types have been scattered all over the world and I suspect that many have been lost to the tropical pests and climate.

When you combine this with the diversity and complexity of the group, and the fact that it is so difficult to gain access to specimens from many neotropical countries, because they have virtually banned collecting or export ... it creates a situation where the world experts just can't get the material they need to do really valuable work.

Most of the people in Brazil who I know study tachinids are good workers but are too busy to actually do much tachinid taxonomy because they are dragged on to other groups or are too busy holding down teaching jobs.

We need far more people to take up the study of tachinids (all around the world) and we need better access to specimens, to make use of the expertise around the world :)

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I am not an expert in this area, but I feel that must to agree with every word you wrote, Chris.
Thanks!