[Syrphidae] Maggot ID

Santos Rojo santos.rojo at ua.es
Sat Oct 21 16:13:25 BST 2006


Hi Günter

I agree with Martin Speight that your larvae 
belong to genus Volucella. Curiously due my 
teaching activity about urban pests, sometime ago 
I found a website with very nice photos about 
this topic. Unfortunately (for me) was/is in 
Swedish or Finnish but the URL remain in my 
Bookmark... Apparently the author: Jarmo 
Holopainen (University of Kuopio, Finland) show 
that the larvae of this genus in relation with 
Insect Indoor pests. The species that appear in 
his web is identified as Volucella pellucens. 
This is the information that appear:

<<Ampiaisvieras (Volucella pellucens) on 
asumusten lähellä elävä kookas kukkakärpänen 
(Syrphidae), joka toukat loisivat ampiaispesissä. 
Syksyisin koteloitumaan siirtyvät suurikokoiset 
toukat saattaavat tulla sisätilohin.>>

However I do not use this information in my teach 
because I believed that was only accidental (and 
do not knew exactly what he said!!) but according 
you, can be considered as indoor pest, and... yes 
according the biology of most of the species of 
this genus ... I believe that this people 
have/had a wasps' nests in the roof or close... 
please could you confirm us this point?

Graham Rotheray is the best person for the 
species identification. He has several papers 
about Volucella including a key to the 
determination of the larvae of North European 
Volucella species, please see: 
http://www.studia-dipt.de/con61.htm

The Jarmo's website is: http://www.uku.fi/~holopain/stt/

Please look for Volucella in one of the 3 main 
links of the web and you can found a very good 
photos of larvae very very similar your specimens.

Regards

Santos

======






>Hello everybody,
>
>Yesterday a friend of from the local museum of 
>natural history 
><http://www.inatura.at>www.inatura.at asked me 
>if I could help him identify a larva which I 
>think is a syrphid. The length of the larvae is 
>13mm (without stigmata-"horn" which has another 
>1mm of length). The larvae have been found 
>inside houses in three cities/villages around 
>here (Dornbirn, Feldkirch and Egg, all in 
>Vorarlberg/Western Austria) during the last week 
>- some in a guestroom which is not used very 
>often, some in the corner of a room on the floor 
>with mice's feces around and some "falling from 
>the ceiling" according to the people who brought 
>the larva to the inatura.
>Could anyone of you help me identify the species 
>or genus? I'd appreciate any kind of information.
>Another thing: What were these maggots doing 
>inside the nearly empty rooms? (the people here 
>have asked for this kind of information).
>
>Thanks in advance
>Günter Schwendinger
>
>(Photos by Klaus Zimmermann)
>
>Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:diptlarvdorsvent.jpg (JPEG/«IC») (00154353)
>Attachment converted: Macintosh HD:diptlarvlat.jpg (JPEG/«IC») (0015435A)
>_______________________________________________
>Syrphidae mailing list
>Syrphidae at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
>http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/syrphidae
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/pipermail/syrphidae/attachments/20061021/31a30fc0/attachment.html


More information about the Syrphidae mailing list