Rearing Syrphid Flies

I don't think that I got a notification for your comment here? I only noticed it when I was scrolling through my homepage updates section looking for something else. I have all of my notifications enabled in my settings, so that's odd.

I'll try to keep this journal page updated and post a comment with any significant changes. I wasn't planning on taking photos of them all every single day unless they looked different. I do have to prep a couple more containers since I found two more tiny stowaway larvae that must have still been eggs hidden on the roughly textured seedpods that the earlier larvae were on.

Yes, I've been getting notifications. Lovely work creating observation groups.... I really hope that you get some males and we can get them to species IDs.... do you think you have enough magnification?

Is the list of observation tiles at the end generated automatically based on the links you include?

First one to emerge was a female from container #2. I still tried to get lots of photos to practice different techniques and see what worked best. Chilling it a bit seemed to make it not try to fly, but it was still walking around and cleaning itself. I tried keeping it between a shallow clear acrylic box lid not much deeper than the fly is thick, and a thin clear sheet cut off a plastic container. Then I could flip it for a ventral view without it being able to right itself but still able to crawl around upside down. Shooting through the plastic made for not the clearest image though. I don't know if I'm supposed to chill it to the point where it won't move at all and I can flip it on it's back uncovered? I didn't want to mess with it too much since I don't really need the photos of a female. It was fine uncovered for all the other angles. When I took it outside it flew off right away.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/92389582

'#4 is now done and released. It's a male. I had a bit of trouble getting the photos. I got a few dorsal shots without a cover on, but had to use the cover to get the ventral views. I got a bunch of photos of the terminalis, but I don't know that they are clear enough. I tried rotating them to compare to the sample you sent, but it seems like everything was more "scrunched up" on this fly. Maybe that was from the chilling, shrinkage! I don't know that I could have done better without harming it. It was challenging. One of the Ocyptamus fuscipennis also emerged, #6, and ended up on my kitchen ceiling for a bit.

OK, thank you!! Also consider looking on other host plants. I've found unique and interesting species on pine branches and on the underside of maple leaves.

Yesterday I hit the mother lode while gardening. I saw one little brown larva on a milkweed seed pod and when I pulled the pod off to collect it I found a lot more jammed into the tight spaces between the seed pods. I checked inside another tight cluster of seed pods and now have 23 larvae! Three are the green ones, and the other 20 are the brown ones. Interesting, considering I'd not really seen the brown ones previously. I separated out nine of the biggest ones into hopefully individual containers to photograph and track, but left the other 14 brown ones all together in a larger container for now. I hope they don't try to overwinter on me. I don't know if temperature or day length determines that for these species? It might take me a while to go through the photos and start adding them here.

I cleaned up the post to make it easier to read. I used markdown code instead of html which I think will keep it easy for me to make quick edits. Once I get adults and ids I can move each link from "in progress" to the appropriate sections to keep things grouped. I also removed the linked observation photo tiles since they didn't seem to really do anything, other than perhaps slow down the page loading. I might just wait to add observations for the new larvae until I get photos of them as pupae. If any die before then I likely won't bother to add them at all.