Species Account

Eutolmus rufibarbis  (Meigen, 1820)
Diptera: Larger Brachycera: Asilidae

National status: RDB3
Essex RDB: Listed
Threat: Essex Endangered  




Species Habitat Data
Additional Phenology Data

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The large robber fly Eutolmus rufibarbis is a rare southern species with strongholds in the Breck districts of East Anglia and the heaths of Surrey and West Sussex. Falk (1991a) states that there are only 20 known post 1960 sites, mainly within the Brecks and West Sussex Heaths, with only two recent records for Surrey. In Essex the only record is of a single female found in 1994 on the southwestern edge of Mill Wood, where it was probably looking for an ovipositation site. There is an old (pre-1970) record shown in Drake (1991) for north Kent at TQ56, suggesting that a population may have been present in the region, at least in the past. Shirt (1987) notes that the species is confined to large blocks of open dry heathland, an especially vulnerable habitat. Adults are predatory upon other insects and the eggs are apparently laid within incisions cut by the female ovipositor in herbage, though larval development probably occurs in sandy soil. In 1994 there were extensive sandy grasslands across much of the Mill Wood Pit area, providing both hunting and nesting habitat. However the area has now virtually all been developed for housing and the amount of suitable habitat present both in Chafford Hundred and elsewhere in the region is almost certainly too small to support this species, which must be assumed to be extinct in the county. References

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