One of the most notable visitors to my moth light this past week turns out to not be a moth at all but instead is this kind of house fly. I've not seen the species before.
Steve Kerr, volunteer fly expert from Otago Museum, identified it on iNaturalist as a known but still undescribed species. Entomologist Rod Macfarlane called it "Genus A sp.1" and entomologist Stephen Thorpe called it "Muscidae ST1". (Both Rod and Stephen are no longer with us.)
Steve notes that the species has been "seen only a few times in the past ten years".
It's indicative of NZ's minimal investment in invertebrate taxonomy that a species like this can go for several decades without a professional having time to give it a scientific name. Volunteers can add a lot of natural history knowledge on citizen science platforms like iNaturalist but we rely on the foundation of species names that is built and maintained by professional taxonomists.
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/337641181
#flies #Diptera #nz #taxononmy #UndescribedSpecies #entomology