Black and White Pupa

A few days ago, I came across this unusual pupa in the long grass in Reading University grounds.  I have searched through all the pictures in my reference books and through all the photos at ukleps.org and I have been unable to find any buttefly or moth pupae that look anything like it.  Out of desperation, I did a Google search on "black and white striped cocoon" and that led me to this page at Symbiont Biological Pest Management Co and to this page at the University of California Integrated Pest Management Program.  Both of these suggest to me the pupa might be that of an ichneumon wasp of the genus Hyposoter.  The Checklist of UK Recorded Ichneumonidae lists 15 species of Hyposoter. A search on the web suggests that Hypersoter tend to be small black ichneumons with reddish abdomens, much like the ones I have been seeing all through the summer (see here, and here, for example).  I think I'll take this a very tentative identification.

[Note added 2023-05-29: To be precise, this is would be the pupa of a (probably Noctuid) moth. It might be host to an ichnueon wasp, but there is no particular reason to think that this one is.]

Photo taken in Whiteknights Park, Reading University grounds, Reading, UK, on 2009-08-30.

Heather Flies

Following on from the photos of the Bibionid fever fly the other day, here are some photos of heather flies, Bibio pomonae, (Diptera: Bibionidae), that I took about a month ago, on the hills above Guisborough.  This species is usually found in highland areas (in England, at least).  Females, like the one above, have small eyes.

Males, like these two, have large eyes.

Photos taken on Hangingstone, near Guisborough, North Yorkshire on 2009-07-30 (the female), and on Highcliff, near Guisborough on 2009-08-06 (the males).

A Bug in Beginning PHP6, Apache, MySQL Web Development

I have been working my way through Beginning PHP6, Apache, MySQL Web Development by Timothy Boronczyk et al (Wiley, 2009), carefully doing all the exercises and examples.  In Chapter 6 (Letting the user Edit the Database), on pages 157-159, there is a listing called movie.php which, among other things, displays 3 drop-down selection boxes.  When I ran the program, I noticed that each option in these selection boxes appeared twice. At first I thought I had made an error in typing in the code, but no, I had typed everything in correctly.  Here is the loop that constructs the <option> tags for the first selection box:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    foreach ($row as $value) {
        echo '<option value="' . $row['movietype_id'] . '">';
        echo $row['movietype_label'] . '</option>';
    }
}

The clue lies in the fact that the foreach loop declares the name $value but $value is not referred to anywhere in the loop body. The loop body accesses the elements of $row directly through their indexes. The foreach loop is not needed; all it does is cause the option to be duplicated. This is what the code should be:

while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    echo '<option value="' . $row['movietype_id'] . '">';
    echo $row['movietype_label'] . '</option>';
}

The same correction should be made to the two other selection boxes in movie.php. It also needs to be made to the version of movie.php on pages 167-170.

Isaac Newton - Criminal Investigator

By early 1697, only months removed from the life of a Cambridge philosopher, his network of informers, undercover agents, and street muscle had turned Isaac Newton into the most effective criminal investigator London had ever seen.

From Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter which  is currently being serialized on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week program.

Fever Fly

Seen on on our kitchen window sill a few days ago, a fever fly, Dilophus febrilis (Diptera: Bibionidae). This species is distinguished from the similar Saint Mark's fly (Bibio marci) by the ring of downward-pointing spines on the lower ends of the tarsi on the fore-legs (visible in the above photo).  As is normal in Bibionid flies, the male has much larger eyes than the female (see here), so much so that you might mistake them for different species.  This specimen is a female.

Photos taken in Reading, UK, on 2009-08-31.

Update on Sat 2009-10-24 by Tristram Brelstaff

It turns out I had actually photographed a male just a few days before without realizing they were the same species.  See here.