Hi Bruce,
Great to see you, and your crisp images, around
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Originally Posted by Bruce Williams
Found on Vinca - but there's a lot of other plants close by.
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Any meadow/grasses?
You didn't lift it from "spittle" and not tell us, did you?
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This looks to be an early instar nymph of some type of 'hopper.
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Certainly
I'm always having trouble with all your British frog-, leaf-, plant-, whateverhopper categories so I won't go there
I'm having a hard enough time recognizing even a bare minimum of adult 'hoppers', so any attempt at nymphs is bound to to be headed full speed toward a concrete wall, but hey ... who said skulls can't brake concrete? Gotta try anything
one time
Anyway, having a glance through the key linked below and then looking at images of adults, as there are
very few images of (correctly?) identified nymphs to be found on the net, comparing morphological features such as head shape etc, I would tentatively land on Aphrodinae and possibly maybe the likes of
Aphrodes makarovi or some other
Aphrodes.
Very tentatively indeed however, as that takes a few shortcuts in the key - biggest one being me not being able to recognize
any ocelli on the nymph and still going for that because I liked the end results better
(at 2mm the nymph seems (way?) too big for an early stage Typhlocybinae and all the head shapes of those don't seem to come close enough, and some other twists and turns down that path all end up with shapes that are a worse fit still).
While browsing/comparing please note that the Aphrodinae are a subfamily of the Cicadellidae,
not Aphrophoridae (as the similarity in the names might put you on the wrong track).
Key used:
Zenner, Gudrun; Stöckmann, Marlies, Niedringhaus, Rolf (2005) Preliminary key to the nymphs of the families and subfamilies of the German Auchenorrhyncha fauna. (
PDF - 7MB)
Lists of British species:
Fauna Europae - Aphrodinae,
British Bugs.
Some galleries:
Gernot Kunz,
British Bugs,
Tom Murray,
Keiji Morishima (Japan).
Hope the links help, as my knowledge of these is grossly insufficient. One other option would be to post the images in a German forum where Herbert Nickel reads, or send them to him directly.
Cheers! Arp
Linear Mode
