Friday 2 December 2016

Another new Cranefly for Northants

In mid-September I was sweeping under some willows next to a dried up pond in a former sand pit near Yardley Hastings when I took a small insignificant-looking cranefly. Back at home I keyed it out as a male Ormosia bicornis. On checking its distribution and status, I discovered that this is a Vulnerable (RDB2) species mainly recorded from calcareous woodland in Herefordshire. Its known distribution is shown on the NBN gateway:

As neither the location nor the habitat matched the literature, and with the scarce status of the species, I asked for a second opinion from John Kramer, who helps run the national cranefly recording scheme. John took the specimen and extracted and cleared the genitalia. He mounted the genitalia  on a slide and photographed them at the Natural History Museum in London. I have attached his photograph. It shows the characteristic twin spines on the styles that give it its "bicornis" name. These spines are at the top left and top right of the photo? The specimen now resides in the NHM's collection.

Photo by John Kramer, 2016

No comments:

Post a Comment