236 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 



it seems strange that no one has hitherto published a comprehensive or 

 even partial list of the insects occurring in that interesting locality. 

 During the present summer, while on a short excursion to Utah with Mr. 

 H. G. Hubbard, we had the opportunity of spending some time in the 

 investigation of the insect fauna of the Lake. The larger portion of the 

 insects collected by us, however, are not yet mounted, and still less deter- 

 mined, and the following remarks on our observations, which I venture 

 to offer, are necessarily quite fragmentary and of a preliminary character. 



The insect that, on account of the enormous number of individuals, 

 cannot fail to attract the first attention of every visitor to the Lake, is a 

 Dipteron of the genus Ephydt'a. Various species of this genus are 

 known to occur in great number in salt water, and others occasionally 

 become a nuisance in the vats and conduit pipes of salt-works. The 

 particular species from the Great Salt Lake was first collected by Capt. 

 Stansbury's expedition, and briefly noticed in 1852 by T. R. Peale in a 

 letter appended to Prof. Haldeman's paper on the few insects collected by 

 that expedition. Subsequently Dr. Packard (Am. Journ. Sc. and Arts, 

 1 87 1, p. 105,) described the puparium and named the species Ephydra 

 gracilis. The larva and imago still remain undescribed. 



Along the sandy beaches of the ocean we usually find one or several 

 windrows of seaweed cast up by the waves and marking the line of high 

 tides. Similar windrows may be seen all around Great Salt Lake, but 

 they consist exclusively* of the puparia of this Ephydra. The lake itself 

 is full of floating puparia, which are gradually washed ashore, and if the 

 breeze freshen and the waves get higher, the mass of puparia is pushed 

 higher up the beach and forms a well-defined windrow, which can be 

 plainly distinguished even on small photographs of any part of the lake 

 shore. On June 13th, the most recent windrow (/. e. that nearest to 

 the water), averaged nearly three inches in height and from four to five 

 inches in width wherever the beach is sloping ; at the rocky portion of the 

 beach it was much higher, while on the flats the puparia are more spread 

 out and form a kind of matting over the wet salt mud. Later in the 

 season the accumulation of puparia became much greater. Investiga- 

 tion of the puparia on the day mentioned showed that most of them were 

 alive, that only a small proportion had hatched, and that there was not a 



*The dead bodies of various insects of other orders which have fallen into the Lake 

 are intermingled with the mass of the Ephydras. Most of them are badly decayed, 

 and the number of individuals and species thus found is very small. 



