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Sphaerophoria potentillae Claussen, 1984

Identification

Identification difficulty = 4. microscope_icon camera_icon_cross according to Ball & Morris, 20241

Biology

Larva unknown. Occurs in wet, unimproved grassland where adults have been found visiting Achillea sp., Tormentil Potentilla erecta and buttercups Ranunculus sp.

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

Status

VULNERABLE - Ball & Morris, 20142.

Distribution

This species was added to the British list from wet Culm grasslands in North Devon by Stubbs (1989)3. It has been recorded from a handful of sites in the immediate vicinity of the original discovery and a site on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall in 2001. Wolton(2015)4 provides some notes on the habitat and behaviour of the species. The occurrence of this species in Britain was predicted by Speight (1988)5, who illustrates the male genitalia. It was originally described from a series of bogs in northern Germany and has so far only been found in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, northern France and Britain (Speight, 2017)6, but there are few records. dotmap

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

  2. Ball, S., & Morris, R. (2014). A review of the scarce and threatened flies of Great Britain. Part 6: Syrphidae. ( No. 9). Species status (pp. 1–130). Peterborough: JNCC. ↩

  3. Stubbs, A. (1989). An additional Britsh Sphaerophoria discovered in Devon. Dipterists Digest (first series), 2, 34–35. ↩

  4. Wolton, R. (2015). Sphaerophoria potentillae Claussen, 1984: notes on habitat, behaviour and female colouration. Hoverfly Newsletter, 59, 3–5. ↩

  5. Speight, M. (1988). Syrphidae known from temperate Western Europe: potential additions to the fauna of Great Britain and Ireland and a provisional species list for N. France. Dipterists Digest (first series), 1, 2–35. ↩

  6. Speight, M. (2017). Species accounts of European Syrphidae ( No. 97). yrph the Net, the database of European Syrphidae (Diptera) (p. 294). Dublin: Syrph the Net publications. Retrieved from https://pollinators.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/StN-2017-Species-Accounts.pdf ↩