Readers’ wildlife photos

Please send in your good photos. Tony Eales from Australia heeded my call, and here are some of his pictures. Tony’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here’s are a few recent observations of interest.

Perhaps only the photographers will be able to tell but I’ve had a laptop breakdown and am using an ancient laptop with an even more ancient version of Photoshop. Hence a lot of these images aren’t up to my usual mid-tier quality.

Firstly some mimicry. I did a quick trip back up to Queensland in mid-December and photographed what I was pretty certain was an Ichneumonid wasp. Turns out it is a fly in the soldier fly family, Stratiomyidae, which includes a number of wasp mimics. Turns out this one was a rarely seen species and mine is possibly the first photograph of a living specimen. The fly is called Elissoma danielsi.

Offhand I can’t think of a specific model. Ichneumonid wasps are extremely varied and colourful and it may be that this fly is just mimicking the general form of this wasp family, rather than a specific species.

Here is a somewhat similar Ichneumonid photographed at the same location for comparison:

Soldier beetles, in the family Cantharidae, are relatively soft bodied for a beetle and rely more on their distastefulness to protect themselves from predators. One very common small soldier beetle genus is Heteromastix. The genus is in desperate need of revision so I can’t say what species this is, but they are all around 4-6mm long and look basically like this:

And naturally this colour and form is widely mimicked. Here’s a mating pair of Oedemeridae, probably Dohrnia simplex:

I also found my first true Blister Beetle, family Meloidae. It too was a mimic, this time of the nasty tasting Lycid beetles. I believe it’s Palaestra rufipennis, but there are other Lycid-mimicking blister beetles in Australia.

In the realm of camouflage, rather than mimicry, I found a species of Ceraon, a type of treehopper that has a variety of horn-like ornaments, making them look like a node on a twig when resting.

Other notable finds, an undescribed shield bug, Anischys sp., that seems to live in the mountains of southeastern Australia, known as the Australian Alps.

A hanging fly, probably Harpobitticus australis, with another hanging fly as prey. I wonder if it was an attempted mating gone wrong. The males supposedly bring ‘nuptial gifts’ of a recently captured prey item for the female to snack on while getting the deed done. I couldn’t see any gifts so perhaps he turned up empty handed and was rewarded appropriately:

And a spider I have been wanting to find for a while. They are small and not common, living in leaf litter and similarly overlooked habitats. It’s in the family Orsolobidae or Giant Goblin Spiders. Okay, it’s giant for a Goblin Spider but hardly giant for a spider. Anyway the peculiar six-eye arrangement was the key to its identity. Probably Tasmanoonops sp.:

And finally, I, along with some other citizen scientists, were mentioned in dispatches. Researchers Aiden Webb at The University of Melbourne, Joanne Birch and Russell Barrett described a new species of Grass-lily from South East Queensland. They were alerted to the fact that there appeared to be a difference in the SEQ population using photos uploaded to iNaturalist  by myself and two other citizen scientist observers. These differences in habit and colour would not be at all obvious from dried preserved specimens but the difference was plain in the live photos. Here’s the newly described flower, Caesia walalbai:

An a link to the paper https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/TEL/article/view/17346