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Hello,

despite a sunny day with 27 °C there were only very few Syrphidae on the wing on Sunday: one Rhingia campestris, one Helophilus pendulus and the rather small Eristalis female below at a blackberry hedge on mallow flowers (northwest Germany). It made to me the impression, that it did not belong to the usual E. arbustorum or interrupta,

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Pic #2

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Pic #3

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No comments? :|

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Dear Juergen, you surely know the Eristalis key http://web.archiv...stkey.html as well as we others do... If you or we cannot see the necessary characters, there will be no reply...

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Hello Sundew,



no, I didn't know that key. I as a layman do not work with keys, because even with better photos I mostly don't know if I see the right characters. I thought, keys are used mainly by specialists with a specimen under a binocular. I hoped someone could recognize this fly by his/her experience. It looked different (to me) from all the E. arbustorum/interrupta I see frequently.

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Well, Juergen, you have a forum of your own and more that 9,500 posts in this one - so you should not stress your "nonprofessionalism" too much! Now we have 3,600 forum members - what do you think, how many "real dipterists" are among them? I am a botanist but learned a lot in the last 10 years. Likewise you have meanwhile gathered a lot of experience that also allows to read keys. Without looking into keys one cannot know the important characters that differ from fly to fly and can neither focus the camera on them nor decide which picture is worth posting. Meanwhile I gathered keys for many insect families (at the moment I deal with Limoniidae) and compile also information from the "Forum Search". I do not want to bother the handful of true experts too much, and it makes me proud to find out many names myself (especially in my beloved barklice). Try it - it is most satisfying!

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Hello Sundew,


accumulated since 11 years now...


I am a layman knowing a little bit of this and that, but nothing in deep. And Diptera are only one of my interests, I am more a generalist. It's a pity that we have no real dipteroligst in our forum, so that I often have to relegate people to diptera.info, because I cannot identify their flies.


The problem is not only to read keys, but to identify the given characteristics on photos. I am often not able to count antenna segments (not really important in Diptera, but in Hymenoptera etc.), because I don't recognize the borders between them. And counting bristles on fly thoraxes or legs confuses me totally. I admire the specialists who see them clearly and know where they belong.


Oh, come on, that's not fair! I am also not the one who posts dozens of pictures of animals, spoiling the experts precious time for flies I also could identify myself. I guess this is the one and only Eristalis I posted in the whole year 2016 - from hundreds of photos of Syrphidae I took this year.
I have got photos of unidentified Diptera (and many other insects of course) here on my harddisk dating back to 2005 or 2006. Maintaining a forum of my own and trying to answer questions of many (more laic than me) people is very time consuming. And especially when you have a weak health like me and cannot sit at the PC for more than two or three hours in a row, then you cannot go into the depths of all special subareas of the science like learning the different terminologies in every branch (and it IS different between dipterology and arachnology (where my roots are) for example), which are necessary to interpret keys from different subfields.