Macro mayhem

The weather turned stormy this morning, which would have been fine if we'd received a decent amount of rain, but though 10mm had been forecast, I doubt in the event if we received even half of that. Enough to dampen the surface of the ground, essentially, and encourage the already suffering plant roots to turn upwards to try to reach it. Sigh.

Instead what we got was wind, gusting and swirling around the place at up to 30mph, and making macro work nigh-on impossible. Of the half-dozen sharp images I managed to capture over several trips around the garden, this one (taken at about 7pm, after the wind had begun to die down a little) is my favourite of the day. 

The black and yellow spotty and stripy hoverflies can be a bit of a nightmare to identify, but I'm pretty confident that this one is female Eupeodes corollae - which doesn't really have a common name in this country, though Steven Falk calls it the Migrant Field Syrph, and Obsidentify calls it the Migrant Aphideater. There's a bit of a clue in both those names to the fact that it's a migratory species, whose numbers here peak around midsummer with the arrival of an influx from the Continent.

The only feature that gives me pause as to the identification is that forward of the antennae this species supposedly has an entirely yellow face, and though you can't see it here this specimen has a slightly darkened profile. But Eupeodes are notoriously variable, and the pale creamy colour of her spots, the smudgy markings between her eyes and her antennae, and most notably the fact that her abdominal spots reach the edges of her abdomen, all say E. corollae, so that's my pitch and I'm sticking to it.

A couple of fun facts before I go. The first, courtesy of Hoverflies of Britain and Ireland by Ball & Morris (aka the hoverfly bible) is that Eupeodes larvae, which are all aphidivorous*, can bend the front half of their bodies, and will rear up and lift their aphid prey clear of the plant before eating it. It's thought that this prevents distress pheromones from the victim reaching the rest of the aphid colony, and warning it to leave the area. The second, which is cited by Wikipedia, is that in a couple of European research studies E. corollae larvae have been trialled against aphids and scale insects by commercial fruit growers, but were found to be partial to the fruit, which they ate in preference to the aphids they were supposed to be controlling**.

* voraciously aphidivorous, reputedly
** and seemingly also voraciously frugivorous