Rediscovery and Range Extension of the Stalk-eyed Fly, Sphyracephala subbifasciata Fitch (Diptera: Diopsidae) in Colorado and Wyoming
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on recent collections of the stalk-eyed fly, Sphyracephala subbifasciata Fitch in northeastern Colorado during 2010 and northwestern Wyoming during 1990. The Wyoming record extends the distribution of this family westward by almost 1200 km, and is the first confirmed record of the species in that state. For many years it was thought that only a single species of Diopsidae, S. brevicornis (Say, 1828), occurred in North America with S. subbifasciata as a synonym (Sabrosky, 1965; Peterson, 1987). However, Feijen (1989) recognized S. subbifasciata as a valid species. Fitch (1855) described S. subbifasciata originally from Illinois. Feijen (1989) subsequently recorded S. subbifasciata from southeastern Canada south to Maryland, west to South Dakota and Colorado. During an insect biodiversity survey of the Soapstone Prairie Natural Area (SPNA) in northeastern Larimer Co., Colorado a single female specimen of S. subbifasciata was collected on 3 October 2010 by the first author. Previously the only other Colorado specimens known were five specimens from Fort Collins, Colorado collected in 1895 (Feijen, 1989). This specimen of S. subbifasciata was collected by sweeping emergent stream and streamside vegetation, primarily Mentha species and grasses, along Spottlewood Creek in the SPNA, located 40 km north of Fort Collins. The Wyoming record of S. subbifasciata, a single male, was collected by the noted dipterist, Professor Robert Lavigne, while sweeping vegetation by Crayfish Creek, in Yellowstone National Park, Teton County, Wyoming. This specimen was collected on 14 June 1990. This specimen extends the known range of S. subbifasciata approximately 1200 km westward from Grand Forks, North Dakota and Kansas City, Kansas to Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. We provide photographs (Fig. 1) of S. subbifasciata to facilitate identification and to encourage others to collect this interesting and uncommon fly in Rocky Mountain region. Currently, only ten specimens are known from this region including the recent collections in Colorado and Wyoming (Table 1). In North America, the family Diopsidae is represented by two species, S. subbifasciata and S. brevicornis. Feijen’s (1989) revision provides an excellent discussion of the family; unraveling the early synonymy, misspellings and historic misidentifications. He provided illustrations of the morphological characters of these species, a diagnostic key and listed examined material by states. Recent and past collection records show that specimens of S. subbifasciata are few and widely dispersed in Rocky Mountain states. We hypothesize that the unique Yellowstone habitat contains many warm springs and streams that may provide diopsids with protection from low winter temperatures and strong prairie winds. These flies are known to be poor fliers (Lavigne, 1962), but warm springs may provide good protection until adults could emerge in spring and disperse in summer. This behavior is consistent with that described for the closely related S. brevicornis (Flint, 1956; Hochberg-Stasny, 1985) and the geographically distant, but also closely related S. hearseiana Westwood from Bangladesh and India (Feijen, 1989). We do not know how they survive winters in northeastern Colorado unless they find protection in rock crevices, under rocks or wide bark of the few plains cottonwoods (Populus sargentii Dode) along the banks (Flint 1955, Lavigne, 1962) of Spottlewood Creek.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".