Beautiful Hover Fly
Female, profile (cleaning wings)
Ellura
Beautiful Hover Fly
Female, Body Patterns
 
                      
Beautiful Hover Fly (Austalis pulchella)Class: Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta)
Order: Flies (Diptera)
Family: Hover Fly (Syrphidae)     iNaturalist Observation
Species: Beautiful Hover Fly (Austalis pulchella)
This Photo:     🔍Female, Face🔎

Thank you Tony Daley for confirming the id of this species for us

General Species Information:
Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere
A large fly at ~13mm long
We would have called it "Polka-dot Hover Fly"
But pulchella means "Beautiful".
Dr Simon Grove (when referring to these & Native Drones) said "their larvae are at least semiaquatic, eg in ditches, organic mud, wet rotting vegetation perhaps." Given our semi-arid environment, we surmise they were raised either in nearby damns (~3kms away) or the river (~11kms). This is a similar situation to large quantity of Odonata we find here.

Copyright © 2020-2024 Brett & Marie Smith. All Rights Reserved. Photographed 19-Nov-2020
This species is an Australian Native Species, not listed in the SA Murray Mallee Survey of 2010.