Over the past five years Graham Rotheray and Geoff Hancock have worked with numerous collaborators including Maria Angeles Marcos-Garcia of the University of Alicante, Chris Thompson of the Systematic Entomology Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution and Manuel Zumbado of the National Institute of Biodiversity (INBio), Costa Rica and have visited Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico and Trinidad to find and rear neotropical Diptera, particularly Syrphidae.

Copestylum ornatum reared from cactus;
known from Costa Rica and Mexico

One syrphid genus that they have concentrated on is Copestylum which is one of the most species-rich syrphid genera with over 300 species. It is a genus of the New World but most species are neotropical. Prior to these visits only a handful of species had been reared. Now they have early stage data on almost 100 species nearly 50 of which are new. All larvae are saprophages in a huge range of decaying plant material from fallen cacti in deserts to tree holes in rain forest trees.

Larva of a new Copestylum species
from an epiphytic bromeliad
in Costa Rica

For the first time a species of Ptychopteridae has been recorded from the Neotropical Region of Central and South America. In the New World, this family was previously known only from North America. A male and female were swept from riverside vegetation in a cloud forest biological reserve in the Sierra Madre mountains of southern Mexico in July 2003 by Geoff Hancock. This finding represents a considerable extension of the range of ptychopterids. Over 2000 miles of mainly desert habitat separate the reserve from mid California where other species of the family are known.

The fly belongs to the genus Ptychoptera and is a new species which has now been described. The paper by Hancock., E.G., M.-A. Marcos-Garcia & G.E. Rotheray. 2006. Ptychopteridae - a fly family new to the Neotropical Region and description of a new species. Zootaxa 1351: 61-68 can be freely downloaded from the Zootaxa website http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/2006f/zt01351p068.pdf

A glimpse of the cloud forest where the new fly was found

Richardiidae is a family of poorly studied neotropical Diptera. In collaboration with the National Institute of Biodiversity (INBio) in Costa Rica, several species have been reared for the first time. They were found as saprophages in decaying fruits and plant stems. Very few richardiid larvae are known and Graham Rotheray will deal with early stages. Geoff Hancock has visited or borrowed material from the major collections and a generic key to adults will be published in the forthcoming, Manual of Mesoamerican Diptera.