1 86 PSYCHE [Oct. — Dec. 



THE RE-DISCOVERY OF PHILORUS (BLEPHAROCERA) YOSEMITE 



OSTEN SACKEN. 



BY VERNON L. KELLOGG, STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CAL. 



About 3 P. M. on June 6, 1876, Baron von Osten Sacken caught three flying 

 male Blepharocerid flies "on the bridle-path to the foot of the Upper Yosemite 

 Fall." From these specimens he described the new species Blepharocera yosemite, 

 and since that time no further records of the capture of representatives of the 

 species have been made. This last summer, while tramping and climbing in the 

 Sierra Nevadas, I took occasion to visit the " bridle-path to the foot of the Upper 

 Yosemite Fall " with Osten Sacken 's twenty-five years gone capture in mind, but 

 there were no delicate-winged B. yosemite hovering by the path side. About sixty- 

 miles farther south, however, in another great Californian flat-floored, vertical 

 walled gorge, the Grand Canyon of the King's River, I found the larvae and pupae 

 of a Blepharocerid species new to me, which prove, on dissection of the well formed 

 adults from the pupal cases, to be the immature stages of Osten Sacken's Yosemite 

 species. I have before me males and females (taken from the pupal cases), larvae 

 and pupae, so another gap in our knowledge of the Blepharocerid fauna is filled in. 



These larvae and pupae were taken July 15, 1903, from the smooth, sub- 

 merged surfaces of great granite blocks fallen into a swift little clear-water stream 

 called Granite Creek, from a vertical cliff-side lifting three thousand feet above. In 

 the relation of their home stream to the great mountains, in all their environment, 

 they might as well have been in the Yosemite Valley in the stream which falls 1600 

 feet over a cliff's verge to make the Upper Yosemite Fall. The two great canyons, 

 that of the Merced (the Yosemite) and that of the King's, have the same relative 

 relation to the main crest of the Sierra Nevada, the same altitude, the same con- 

 ditions of temperature and moisture, the same geology and botany and zoology. 



The imagines (dissected from pupal cases) show exactly the characteristic 

 venation as described by Osten Sacken, which I have taken to be diagnostic of 

 the genus PJiilorus (see my "Net-winged Midges of North America," No. XXX of 

 Contrib. to biol. from the Hopkins seaside laboratory, 1903). 



As Osten Sacken had no female specimen and thus could not say whether the 

 separated and dissected eyes of the male were characteristic of both sexes I record 

 here the fact that in the female the eyes are broadly separated and also distinctly 

 bisected (that is, divided by a line into an upper, light brown part, being about | 

 of the whole eye, composed of large ommatidia, and a lower, blackish brown part 

 composed of smaller ommatidia). 



