Dytomyia Bickel, 1994

Ya., Igor, 2021, Discovery of Dytomyia Bickel (Diptera: Dolichopodidae) on the African continent with description of a new peculiar species from Kenya, Israel Journal of Entomology (Oxford, England) 51 (6), pp. 85-91 : 86

Genus Dytomyia Bickel, 1994

Bickel (1994) and Grichanov and Brooks (2017) provided the diagnosis of the genus.Adults can be distinguished by the following characters ( Grichanov & Brooks 2017): head with vertex not strongly excavated; vertical seta strong in both sexes; face and clypeus broad in both sexes; thorax with 4 strong dorsocentral setae in both sexes; lateral scutellar setae absent; female fore femur with 3–4 short pale basoventral setae; male fore tarsomere 1 swollen, with dense pale pile; male hind tibia sometimes with irregular swelling, or callus at middle; male terminalia with cercus with short ventral lobe articulated at base. Grichanov and Brooks (2017) provided a key to all Afrotropical genera of the subfamily Sciapodinae as part of their key to the genera of the Afrotropical Dolichopodidae . Dytomyia is remarkable in having symmetrical male abdominal segments 7 and 8 and basal epandrial foramen in almost all species (except for Australian D. flaviseta Bickel, 1994 ); in other Sciapodinae , the hypopygial foramen is left lateral in position ( Bickel 1994; Grichanov 1998). Females of close Dytomyia species are hardly distinguishable ( Bickel 1994). The coloration and other characters used by Parent (1935) in his description of Sciapus nubilis Parent, 1935 are similar to those in all other Madagascan species of Dytomyia . Their females are now unknown or indeterminable. Sciapus nubilis (MNHN, examined in 1999) was described from a single female. It is regarded as unrecognizable and here declared to be a nomen dubium. This species had been referred to Dytomyia nubilis in Grichanov (2003).