Muscid Fly (Male)
Phaonia sp.
14.33, 121.09
Field Notes
Description:
Coppery-brown-orange fly, about 10mm in length. It has clear wings, reddish eyes, grey thorax with black stripes.
It could be a Phaonia sp. It looks very close to Phaonia subventa, but P. subventa is distributed across parts of the Palaearctic, not in the Oriental region. Phaonia Robineau-Desvoidy, 1830, is a very large genus from the fly family Muscidae, of order Diptera.
The orange body, stripy thorax, which is grey above and orange below, and the bulge on the outer wing help to identify it. The female has varying amounts of black on the abdomen. The sexual dimorphism in the eyes is striking, holoptic (eyes meeting) male and dichoptic female.
Habitat:
Backyard, spotted on a Gabi (Taro) leaf.
Notes:
Similar spotting:
http://www.projectnoah.org/spottings/13824072
Reference:
http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/aocat/muscidae.html (According to this, Phaonia does not occur in the Philippines. A close genus, Phaonina, is the one occurring in the Oriental region. I could not find corroborating images though.)
Other Reference:
http://thetopshamnaturalist.blogspot.com/2010/04/april-fools-day-flies-…
http://www.naturespot.org.uk/species/phaonia-subventa
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phaonia.subventa.female.1.jpg
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