DIPTERA 



FAM. BLEPHAROCERID^ 



by Vernon L. KELLOGG 



WITH 2 PLAIN PLATES 



HE flies belonging to the family Blepharoceridse, or net-winged midges, have long been of 

 peculiar interest to entomologists because of the small number of known species and their 

 supposed rarity, because of the wide and discontinuous distribution of these known 

 forms, because of the remarkable aquatic life of larvœ and pupae, and the strange 

 modification of the body in both these stages in conformity with the curious habits, and because of the 

 peculiar pseudo-net-veining of the wings of the imagines produced b}' a series of folds in the wing 

 membranes. The imagines also present a structural peculiarity of interest in the divided character of 

 the compound eyes. The eyes of tliese flies (as shown b}' the writer in icjoo) are composed of ommatidia 

 of two types, differing in size, in amount of pigmentation, and to some extent in arrangement of the 

 retinal elements, and in their situation in the eye. These differences result in the possibility of a certain 

 degree of accommodation to different intensities of light. 



The Blepharoceridse were introduced as a famil}' b}- Rondani {Prodr. Dipt., Vol. i, i856) under 

 the name oi Asthenidce, without any definition. In 1862 {Monogr. N . A. Dipl., Vol. i, p. 6, 1S62) the generic 

 name Asthenia Westwood having to be given up as preoccupied, Loew gave the famil}- name of Blepha- 

 roceridae. « He had no other choice for the name », says Osten-Sacken, « because the genus Blepharictra 

 Macquart (or Blepharocera, as Loew amended it) was in 1862 the only published genus in the famih'. » 

 Liponeiira Loew (1S44) was at that time considered b)' Loew as a sj'nonym oi Blepharocera and the genus 

 Tanyrhiiia, from Ceylon, which he mentions at the same time with Blepharocera was merely a name 

 without description. Osten-Sacken, in iSgS (« Contr. to the Study of the Liponeuridae », Berl. Eut. 

 Zeitschr., Vol. 40, p. 148-169, iSgS), gave the name Liponeuridae to the family, but in a supplement to 

 this paper [Berl. Eni. Zeitschr., Vol. 40, p. 35i-355, i8g5), and even previous to that (Eut. Monthly Mag-., 

 Vol. 3i, p. 118, 1895), reestablished the name Blepharoceridae. The first species descrided in the family 



