Twelve Syrphs of Christmas! Advance Notice

Hi all,

For December's event I thought we could do something along the lines of 'Twelve Syrphs of Christmas'. The idea being to try to learn and to identify a few 2023 observations of a different genus each day from Christmas Day to Twelfth Night!

Hopefully this will help with our aim to get a few more of 2023's observations through to HRS before they download the year's data.

I'll organise it properly nearer the time, because the needs might change as people identify things over the next couple of weeks but...

In the run up to that it would be a great idea to try to achieve two things:
1) Add as many sex annotations as possible
2) Triage as many observations as possible from higher levels into the correct genus

Both of these things are fantastic exercises for people who are just starting out with an interest in hoverflies, because they don't come with the responsibility of making things 'research grade'. If you make errors, they can be corrected by others and you can learn from them :)

For resources on how to ID hoverflies see the resources page.

Here are relevant links:
EDIT: the sexing appears to be done about as fully as possible now - I've just been through all that remain and I don't think there are any more that I can determine - but someone more experienced might like to have a go at Just the difficult genera - I suspect that a few more of them could be done.
(For adding sex annotations (all hoverflies)
For adding sex annotations (excluding the difficult groups))

For observations not yet identified to genus.

All the best,

Matt

Posted on December 11, 2023 11:21 PM by matthewvosper