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, Body Patterns🔎

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.

This species is

Australian Native Species, not listed in the SA Murray Mallee Survey of 2010.

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