Field of Science

Show All

Name the Bug # 44

By Christopher Taylor at 1/24/2011 01:00:00 pm


Attribution to follow.

Update: Identity now available here. Figure from Balogh & Balogh (1992).

6 comments:

  1. tf24 January 2011 at 19:49

    Gosh... my mind keeps wanting to turn that into dorsal/ventral views of a skull, but I have a feeling that isn't the right track.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adam Yates24 January 2011 at 21:21

    That's a hard one. I'll guess its some kind of arthropod drawn in that weird dismembered convention that arthropodologists like to use. If so its two part body would suggest an arachnid, perhaps a mite of some kind, but I don't know it

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mike Huben25 January 2011 at 00:38

    That's one of the "winged" Oribatid mites. I don't have a clue to their taxonomy: it has been 30 years since I last learned about them.

    But it is not fair to use a diagram without legs, chelicerae or anything else to clue in non-acarologists. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. tf25 January 2011 at 04:24

    If that's the case, then is the specimen a member of the Orbatid genus Galumna? I keep hitting paywalls, but from the first page of several articles, those get distinguished by broad and/or long lamella on either side of the cephalothorax, abdomen longer than broad which may or may not be the case here, and then some other features which I wouldn't be able to assess without a labelled diagram...

    Regardless, if they're orbatids they might be of interest as intermediate hosts to various tapeworms...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Reprobus25 January 2011 at 06:28

    I had this down as the head of an aberrant termite, before I scrolled down the comments. You guys are smokin'.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Christopher Taylor25 January 2011 at 12:41

    I'm going to give three points to tf and two to Mike Huben. And sorry, Mike, I didn't have a picture with legs included available (the chelicerae, on the other hand, are there; they're mostly hidden). It's not Galumna, which has a rounded rather than a pointed snout; this is Monogalumnella neotricha. The characters identifying it to family are referred to in the follow-on post; it can be distinguished from other galumnellids mainly by the large number of setae on the underside of the body.

    ReplyDelete

Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)