End of the century

 Last night after posting I was able to determine that a dipteran larva in Centaurea nigra was, in fact, the picture-winged fly Urophora jaceana (four openings to the anterior spiracles). 

This morning a nice, small Stenus with a very triangular abdomen keyed out to be Stenus picipennis, which fortunately matched lots of pictures of the same online as it's another new Stenus for the reserve. One of my favourite genera of beetles and I could see from habitus that it was a species I didn't know.

Stenus picipennis

Lunchtime, then, was a mission to nab one more species and I set out to find Metzneria larvae in Knapweed. Metzneria proved hard to find but I did find a hiding Larioides cornutus in one flower head, which was the 100th species for 2021. I never did find Metzneria. There were a lot of tephritids, though, and I'll do a feature on Centauria nigra shortly. When a Urophora, or two, are in a flower head you know immediately because the head is hard as a hazelnut. A sideways squeeze will tell you you have flies.

Anyway, this is the spider and the breakdown of inverts which made up the "First 100" club.

Larioides cornutus

Category	Count
mollusc	4
annelid	1
harvestman	4
pseudoscorpion	1
spider	19
tick	1
millipede	3
crustacean	3
collembola	4
hemiptera	7
coleoptera	39
diptera	13
insect-other	1

The whole list for 2021 invertebrate list can be seen by clicking the tab. Remarkably in those 100 species 28 of them have been new to the reserve, including 10 new beetles, 8 new flies and 5 new bugs. That I was able to add four species for spiders has been a big surprise. Whereas the other categories are still quite poorly represented I really expected spider additions to be the occasional one or two a year by now.