Last week I gave you this mystery object that I found dead in the street when visiting Copenhagen earlier this year:

Clearly this is a species of insect in the Order Odonata, which are the dragonflies and damselflies. Damselflies are much slimmer than this, and their wings fold back along their body at rest, so this one is a dragonfly.

Everyone who commented had worked out the species, since the metallic green-bronze body and fuzzy body are quite distinctive.

This is an example of a Downy Emerald Cordulia aenea (Linnaeus, 1758) which is a species that is fairly widespread across northern Europe. While this species does occurs in Ireland, it has only been recorded from a few localities.

We only have one example of this species in the collections of the Dead Zoo, collected in 1978 from County Cork. I was a little surprised that it wasn’t collected by Madame Dragonfly herself, Cynthia Longfield (1896-1991), since she lived in Cork in the 1970s and was a hugely experienced and prolific expert on dragonflies.

Longfield was an adventurous and trailblazing female scientist – the first woman to be a member of the Royal Entomological Society, with expeditions in the 1920s to the Andes, Amazon, Galapagos, Egypt and a host of other localities that she undertook as part of a team from London Zoo, collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum in London, where she later became a voluntary cataloguer and was credited with saving the Museum from fire following bombing during WWII thanks to her actions as part of the Auxillary Fire Service.

Most of Longfield’s collections are held in the NHM, London, but we do have specimens collected by her in the National Museum of Ireland, donated after her retirement and move from South Kensington to Cloyne in County Cork. The Downy Emerald is not one of the specimens we received, but her specimens include new records for Ireland and a number of Paratypes of African species that she collected on her adventures both near and far.

Last week I gave you this fuzzy little fella to have a go at identifying:

It’s a very distinctive caterpillar and I had a feeling it wouldn’t prove much of a challenge (correctly it turns it). Those tufts of hair, “horns” and bristles are a dead give-away.

As everyone who commented recognised, this is the larva of a Vapourer Moth, also known as a Rusty Tussock Moth Orgyia antiqua (Linneaus, 1758).

This day (and night) flying moth is fascinating, as the adults demonstrate quite extreme sexual dimorphism, with the female being almost wingless and the males flying around seeking her out by detecting her “vapours” – the pheromones she secretes that give these moths the name “Vapourer”.

The name Orgyia is apparently meant to derive from the ancient Greek word “órgyia” meaning “outstretched arms” – referencing the front legs of these moths, which splay out in front of them. However, knowing how much taxonomists enjoy a bit of wordplay, I wonder whether the clouds of males attracted to the vapouring females inspired the name for a different reason…

These moths are quite widespread, occurring in Ireland, the UK, across Europe and they are well established in America. They feed on a wide variety of different plants, but generally don’t cause many issues for gardeners as they tend to not be around in very high densities.

This may be a bit surprising, considering the flightless females can carry and lay large numbers of eggs, since they don’t have to worry about maintaining flight weight. But, numbers of moth eggs laid rarely equate to the number of surviving offspring, due to predation and the actions of parasitoid wasps.

I hope you enjoyed working out the identity of this mystery object, and maybe finding out more about a pretty interesting insect.

First of all, I’d like to wish you a very happy and healthy 2020!

Last year I gave you this festive-looking beetle to try your hand at identifying:

It was a bit of a tricky one to get to species, since beetles are notorious for their huge diversity, plus they can vary in appearance quite significantly within a species.

James Bryant recognised this as a member of the Buprestidae, which is a family of wood-boring beetles that are commonly known as Jewel Beetles due to their metallic and iridescent colours. In fact, the wing cases (or elytra)  of some of the most colourful of these beetles have been used in traditional beetlewing jewellery in the parts of Asia where they are found.

Going beyond the family, the identification katedmonson provided through a great cryptic clue was spot-on (assuming I understood it properly). This particular specimen is an example of Chrysochroa rajah Gory, 1840, but in the collection it is still labelled under the synonym C. chinensis.

This species is one of those with a wide distribution, several subspecies and a variety of different colours and patterns, which can make it hard to identify based on just an image of the overall body (or habitus as it’s referred to by entomologists). Just to give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example of the same species in the National Museum, Prague:

Blue and green form of Chrysochroa rajah from southern China. Photo by Hectonichus 2010

So well done to katedmonson for getting this tricky identification. Look out for another mystery next week!

Last week I gave you this impressive beetle to try your hand at identifying:

Now although it’s big and showy, beetles can be hard to identify because there are just so many of them and closely related species can be very hard to tell apart.

This one has distinctive elongated jaws that mark it as being one of the stag beetles (family Lucanidae), which narrows it down, although there are well over a thousand species in the family. This one is a little bigger than most and the jaws are relatively unbranched, with a cleft at the end of a relatively squared-off and downward deflected ‘antler’.

Those ‘antlers’ are used by the males to wrestle for access to females, who have much more sensibly sized jaws and are smaller. Effectively they’re doing the same thing as deer and this is a good example of how evolution can lead to similar trends in behaviour and even sexual dimorphism across very different animal groups.

I think this is Mesotopus tarandus Swederus, 1787 which is a species from West Africa that is becoming increasingly popular in the pet trade. It has slightly shorter ‘antlers’ than the other species (or possibly subspecies) in the same genus, M. regius.

As you probably know, I’m more familiar with vertebrate identification than insects, so I was fortunate to have my intern Esmeralda, who is a keen coleopterist helping narrow this down, although I’m pleased to congratulate jennifermacaire who was on the same track with her identification.

Another mystery next week!

Last week I gave you this insect to have a go at identifying:

I decided that this didn’t need a cryptic answer, since species in the Order of insects that this belongs to can be quite tricky to identify. The Order is of course the Diptera as this has two wings rather than the four most insects have – that means it’s a true fly (as palfreyman1414 pointed out).

Those pointy but sturdy mouthparts (unlike the pointy and skinny mouthparts of things like mosquitoes) give the family that this fly belongs to one of their common names – this is a type of “dagger fly” in the family Empididae – which you can tell from the antennae structure (three segments with the segment at the end being the longest). That helps narrow it down a little, but after that it’s a case of checking against things like wing veination and pattern – note the black line along the back.

Very well done to Emmanuel and James Bryant who noted these features and hit upon the correct genus. This specimen is Empis stercorea Linnaeus, 1761.

This specimen is actually mounted on a microscope slide, which makes it look a little weird:

The label gives us the species, the sex (female) and the common name of “Corn-fly”, which I’ve seen used for a variety of fly species, but not for one of the Empididae. A bit of searching shows that this name is an old one used for Empis sp. in US catalogues for microscope equipment and mounted insects in the 18th Century.

There’s also a circular mark bearing a Wyvern (a two legged winged dragon), which is presumably a makers mark, although I’ve not yet managed to track down who the maker is.

More mysteries next week!