2017 July 24

 

   Return to back-to-business provides an opportunity for a brief reminder of the optimum way of submitting observations to Invertebrate Alert.  Send observations to jtatum at uvic dot ca   We welcome, of course, reports just of sightings and they don’t have to be accompanied with photographs.  If you send a photograph or photographs, please send them in .jpg format as an attachment. It takes me much longer to process if you send them some other way. Remember to say where you saw the animal (not “my backyard” – I don’t know where that is) and when (date with month written in letters!).  Unless I have a query, I don’t generally respond – your “reward” and thank you are when the item gets posted!  There may sometimes be a delay, while we are trying to identify an obscure insect, though if the delay is over a week you might check with me in case I have overlooked the record (which occasionally happens).  If you know the identification of the insect, please say so – so that I don’t have to spend time figuring it out myself!  If you don’t know, we’ll do our best – that may take a few days.   Jeremy Tatum

 

  Bryan Gates sends a photograph of a European Paper Wasp. He writes that for the past four years the species has been nesting in a hollow aluminium railing at his house in Black Creek.

 

European Paper Wasp Polistes dominula (Hym.: Vespidae)  Bryan Gates

 

 

   Val George sends photographs of two moths from his Oak Bay house, July 21.  He also sends a photograph of a Great Arctic butterfly from Mount Washington, seen on the VNHS Botany trip to Mount Washington, July 23, thus again dashing my (Jeremy) theory that this species occurs only in even-numbered years!

 

Choristoneura rosaceana (Lep.: Tortricidae)  Val George

 

Clemensia albata (Lep.: Erebidae – Arctiinae – Lithosiini)  Val George

 

Great Arctic Oeneis nevadensis (Lep.: Nymphalidae – Satyrinae)  Val George

 

 

   Jochen Moehr sends a picture of a crane fly from his house in Metchosin, July 9.  Alas –  in spite of the efforts of the best brains in Victoria, the exact species identity of this well-marked insect still eludes us.

 

Crane fly (Dip.: Tipulidae)  Jochen Moehr

 

 

   New VNHS member Michael Croteau photographed a syrphid fly on Mount Work on June 3.  We are grateful to Jeff Skevington and Andrew Young for the identification as a male Melanostoma sp.  Dr Skevington advises us that Melanostoma  is probably a complex of species, but at present they are all lumped as M. mellinum.

 

Melanostoma mellinum (Dip.: Syrphidae)  Michael Croteau