State of the Syrphs - 1-Feb-2024

Hello all,

The award for first iNatUK hoverfly observation of 2024 goes to @kiteheights for this Eristalis tenax that was enjoying the view from a WWII gunsite at Lavernock Point Nature Reserve on Jan 6th. Congratulations, your prize is a warm glow!

This February we will undoubtedly reach 75,000 iNatUK hoverflies! Very nice :)

Problem with images

Early in January Google changed the ways in which images could be displayed from Googledrive, which prevented all the images I've posted to this project from showing (and mucked up an awful lot of other websites too). I've managed to fix it for the website, but I notice they are still not visible on the apps.

"What to look out for"

As mentioned previously I'm preparing some monthly resources to help us seek out a greater diversity of hoverflies by highlighting seasonal species that are currently very underrecorded on iNat. Obviously what is 'seasonal' is based on an overall view - spring species will be slightly earlier in the south than the north, so bear that in mind. I'm not doing one for February specifically, because there aren't any species that meet the requirements for inclusion that early in the year. Also, I want to write every month and post them all at once. If you want to get ahead of the game, when the March article is published it will be here.

Identifications

It's great to see that over the winter we have consistently been adding far more identifications than were added in the two years before the project started.

While the number of observations does increase each month from now until July, it doesn't really take off until April - so we have two more months to reduce the NeedsID pile further before floods of new observations start arriving. I would love to think we could get the total number needing ID down below 1/2 of its peak last year - it peaked at just over 17000, so that's a target of below 8500. Very doable I think.

Here's what we currently face: (incidentally, a tip for reading these if you're not sure what the smaller genera are - the Syrphini genera are in alphabetical order from bottom to top, the tribes are also in alphabetical order but grouped by subfamily. This is also the order of the legend from left to right - but the names written on the bars are omitted from the legend)

As you can see we didn't make as much progress this month as in December, but that's hardly surprising with many of us being back to work.

Still, only 8 genera increased in numbers (not by much), 21 remained unchanged and 41 were reduced. The biggest fallers (with >50obs to start with) were Merodon (-64%), Pipizella (-41%), Neoascia (-26%), Eupeodes (-25%), Rhingia (-25%), Scaeva (-22%), Eumerus (-14%), Melanostoma (-11%), Pipiza (-11%), Melangyna (-10%), and Xylota (-9%). There is some correspondence with the genera that were specified in the latter part of the 'Twelve Syrphs of Christmas' event.

The genera still with more than 100 observations needing ID are: Eupeodes (1395), Platycheirus (1394), Eristalis (1325), Melanostoma (978), Cheilosia (606), Helophilus (254), Syrphus (243), Xylota (220), Epistrophe (130), Chrysotoxum (124), and Neoascia (107).

Annotations

An unsurprisingly small number of observations were uploaded in January, and we maintained a high level of annotation.

Overall, the proportion of UK observations with a sex annotation has continued to rise steadily.

Obscured Locations

A higher proportion of obscured locations this month, but this is not too much of a concern because that proportion is always likely to be volatile when the total number of observations is so small. (It represents just 11 observations)

Hope you have a fine February.

All data compiled on 31/01/2024

Posted on February 1, 2024 09:46 AM by matthewvosper