Madagascar
is considered to be a biodiversity hotspot, with many plants and
animals recorded there that are not known from any other location.
One of the groups that has remarkably high diversity on the island
are the True Flies, Diptera, with the island thought to be home to
about three times as many Fly species as the entire of Africa.
Despite this high diversity the Flies of Madagascar are not well
studied, with some groups thought likely to show high diversity on
the island hardly recorded at all; for example only seventeen species
of Bee Fly have been recorded on Madagascar, out of a global total of
about 4700 described species.
In a
paper published in the journal Zootaxa on 12 October 2016, Natalia
Maass of the University of Eastern Kentucky, Zachary Larmore and
Mattew Bertone of the North Carolina State University and Michelle Trautwein of the California Academy of Sciences, describe a new
species of Bee Fly from southern Madagascar.
Fossil Bee Flies from the Dominican Republic and North America. Bee Flies, Bombyliidae,
are True Flies, Diptera, specialized for feeding on pollen and
nectar, many of which have evolved long proboscises for nectar
feeding. Many adult Bee Flies resemble Bees...
The new
species is placed in the genus Thevenetimyia,
and given the specific name spinosavus,
meaning 'spiny grandfather' a reference to the spines present on the
Fly's scutum and scutellum and the white hairs on its body, which
give it a 'granfatherly' appearance. The species is described from a
single male specimen collected in the Zombiste National Park in
southern Madagascar by Mike Irwin and Rasolondalao Harin’Hala in October 2002.
Thevenetimyia
spinosavus, lateral view.
Maass et al.
(2016).
Thevenetimyia
spinosavus is the first species
of Thevenetimyia known
from Madagascar, and only a single species is known from Africa,
Thevenetimyia quedenfeldti from
the Magreb Region of northwest Africa (Mauritania, Algeria, and
Tunisia), with the majority of known species coming from the pine and chaparral belt of western North America.
See also...
Fossil Bee Flies from the Dominican Republic and North America. Bee Flies, Bombyliidae,
are True Flies, Diptera, specialized for feeding on pollen and
nectar, many of which have evolved long proboscises for nectar
feeding. Many adult Bee Flies resemble Bees...
Follow Sciency Thoughts on Facebook.
