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Eristalis abusiva Collin, 1931

Identification

Identification difficulty = 3. microscope_icon camera_icon_cross according to Ball & Morris, 20241

Synonymy

Eristalis abusivus Collin, 1931 in Stubbs & Falk (19832, 20023). The issue here is whether the generic name Eristalis should be considered as masculine or feminine and hence dictate the '-us' or '-a' ending for the specific name.  Although ICZN ruled in 1993 that this and some other genera should be treated as feminine, this has not been accepetd by all authors, so you may still see the masculine form used in some publications.

Biology

The larva is of the 'long-tailed', aquatic type, and is associated with wet, decaying organic matter such as that around ponds. It has been found at the edge of a pond on moorland (Smith, 1989)4. Adults are usually seen visiting flowers around the edges of scrub, hedges and tall vegetation near the larval habitat.

Flight period

The following plots show the number of unique records per week that were not reported to be of eggs, larvae or pupae. phenology

Distribution

Although widely distributed, this species is rarely encountered inland. Most records are coastal, especially from the west coast. Records extend north to the Island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides and to Mainland Shetland. It is possible that this species is overlooked as most recorders expect to encounter it in coastal localities but it does occur inland. dotmap

Trends

The following plots show the Frescalo TFactor vs year and a map of the rescaled frequency (all records) for the species. For an explanation see here. trend

  1. Ball, S., & Morris, R. (2024). Hoverflies of Britain and Ireland. WILDGuides (3rd ed.). Oxford: Princeton University Press. ↩

  2. Stubbs, A., & Falk, S. (1983). British Hoverflies: An Illustrated Identification Guide (1st ed.). Reading: BENHS. ↩

  3. Stubbs, A., & Falk, S. (2002). British Hoverflies An Illustrated Identification Guide (2nd ed.). Reading: BENHS. ↩

  4. Smith, K. (1989). An introduction to the immature stages of British flies . Handbooks for the Identification of British Insects, 10(14), 1–280. ↩