Day two was similar to day one, but more productive. I situated myself at my station, powered on the TV and microscope (the scope was a webcam attached to the TV so people can see what I am looking at), and went to fly town. I spent the majority of my working on one bag of flies. I was coming across a couple issues with most of the flies.
1) I keyed a majority out to be Exoprosopa. That should be the end of the story right? Wrong. Many of the flies were missing the distinct Exoprosopa antenna. This is what the antennae should look like:
Most of the antennae I was looking at were lacking that second flagellomere, which is a defining trait of the genus. Dr. Student looked at one, and said that it didn't look broken. The Doc looked at them and couldn't decide if it was "intentional" or not. Seriously, what are the odds that six flies all have broken flagellomeres? Actually, potentially really good, because The Doc might have found an antenna with the stub of a broken flagellomere.
2) One of the flies obviously lacked this antenna trait and I keyed them out to be Litorrhynchus which I think is still technically Exoprosopa but these mouth parts were projecting pretty far beyod the oral cavity. But the wings did not really resemble this one picture of Litorryhncus wings I had, but they weren't really Exoprosopa-y either.
Eventually The Doc came in and we came to the mutual decision that it would be better for me to stay away from the anthracine flies (ex. Exoprosopa, Villa, Anthrax, etc.) because there is a lot of them and they're annoying/difficult to identify because of their traits. My focus is going to be else where now. I found a bunch of Systropus which are pretty cool wasp mimics, a bunch of Gerons which I have literature on, and some Systeochus which are adorable. I also have two flies in bombyliinae, that are different from the Systeochus I sorted. I then need to go through everything else and pull out the non anthracine flies. My life is going to be somewhat easier, and some what harder because finding the literature of the known species so I can compare to what I have is going to be a pain.
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