State of the Syrphs - 1-Aug-2023

Hello all!

It's been about a month since we started trying to harness this project to help us improve our own and others' observations for the benefit of the HRS, so I thought I'd give an update and a bit of a 'lie of the land' analysis of the UK Syrphidae on iNat. We've now got 47 people on board, so thanks to you all: whatever your level of interest/contribution may be I hope you've found something of interest and of use.

Everything is new this month of course, so as far as the project's content is concerned everything is an 'update'. If you haven't checked out the index, then please do!

I collected some stats a couple of weeks ago and again yesterday so...

Annotations

A lot of the content posted in the project so far has focussed on adding annotations. This is a great way to contribute if you don't fancy doing many identifications yet. Some of you have taken this by storm, so thanks!

From 2022 about 13% of observations have a life stage annotation, and 20% have a sex annotation, oddly in the early part of this year it was almost the other way round. But for the July just gone that has already increased to over 80% for life stage and 70% for sex - bravo! If anyone else fancies chipping in with a few minutes here and there I'm sure we can get both numbers higher still, and create more slack for each other :)

(I should add that this does not mean that Roger and the team at HRS will see quite that proportion of annotations, because a proportion of these annotations will have been added after the observation became Research Grade. But even so, it must be making quite some difference!).

Harder-to-quantify-things

A few of you have gotten in touch to say you've switched to pinned coordinates instead of using obscured coordinates; that's awesome, it will make your observations useable for the HRS. If you've no idea what that's about - and for other information about how to optimise your observations for the recording scheme to use, see here - this is the most important post in the project :)

The 'NeedsID' Pile

The summer is peak time for observations, and many identifiers are focussed on observing rather than identifying, so it is no surprise that the number of UK hoverflies needing ID has gone up in the last couple of weeks to just over 16000. Almost all genera have gone up, but someone's done a job-lot of Merodon and cut it by a quarter - well done if that's you!

If you've not felt comfortable identifying before why not keep tabs on just a smaller group of easier flies that you are confident with? Perhaps tick off a few Episyrphus as they come in? Or can you tell Myathropa from Eristalis? Or Syritta pipiens? Keeping on top of these common species frees other people up for the harder things.

Otherwise, here's a deeper dive to reveal the 'shape' of the 'NeedsID' pile - some food for strategic thought, in the form of pie:

As you can see the 'NeedsID' Pile is dominated by the subfamily Syrphinae. The three tribes of Syrphinae, (Syrphini + Bacchini + Melanostomini) are three of the four neediest tribes, and a good 2/3 of the total. (The second neediest tribe is Eristalini, which is dominated (75%) by Eristalis)

Taking a closer look at Syrphini...

If 'Syrphini Pie' sounds appetising to you, perhaps you'd like to take a large mouthful of Eupeodes this year... This one genus accounts for more than a third of Syrphini, and more than 1 in 7 of all UK hoverflies needing ID. No other tribe has that many! (It is 1 in 10 of the European hoverfly pile too)

There's no secret as to why this is - they're commonly observed and hard to ID; but if you know your latifasciatus from your luniger and your corollae... and if you can pick them out from the mishmash of obscurities... then you can probably pick off quite a lot!

Plenty of other genera deserve an honourable mention though: Eristalis (1660), Syrphus (1308), Platycheirus (1298), Melanostoma (934), Sphaerophoria (854), and Cheilosia (608) all have more than 500. Alternatively, perhaps you might prefer to help some of those 995 Syrphini 'Stuck at Tribe' by putting them into the right genus. Or whatever you fancy, of course!

Whatever you do, and whenever you do it: Happy Syrphing!

Posted on August 1, 2023 09:49 PM by matthewvosper