Friday Arthropod - a fly from Hawaii

Last week, I had a picture of a live spider for you to identify. Most of the guesses came quickly, and were absolutely correct - the spider in the picture was a Spiny-Backed Orbweaver. This week's arthropod might be a little more challenging.

The picture below features a pinned museum specimen, and was taken through a light microscope at about 40x magnification. The edge of a quarter appears in the photo for scale. The species in question is unique to the island of Hawaii, and is found on the wetter slopes of the younger volcanoes.

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Good luck. I'll post either the answer (if someone got it right) or a hint on Monday.

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Looks like a picture wing fly. I can't tell you what species. Its wings look like the wings of Drosophila planitibia that I saw in the Edwards et al 2007 paper in PLoS ONE "A Database of Wing Diversity in the Hawaiian Drosophila"

By parasacama (not verified) on 05 Oct 2007 #permalink

You'll need to post more pictures. It is most likely a Drosophila. But there is a surpising diversity in little tiny flies, and the charactistics that safely separate Drosophilidae from the other more obscure families are not visible. Also considering there is 500+ species of Drosophila (most undescribed)in the Hawaiin Islands, a species identification might be more deficult.

It is a Hawaiian Drosophila. It is not D. planitibia, but that guess was very close in phylogenetic terms.

I'm not going to post additional pictures, not because I can't, but because there's enough in that picture.

Here's your hint: Don't focus on the wings. Use its head.