Gold-striped Velvet Ant
Female, dorsal
Orange-banded Velvet Ant
Female, profile
| Gold-striped Velvet Ant Female, dorsal | | Orange-banded Velvet Ant Female, profile | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | Ant Bee Wasps (Hymenoptera) | ||||
| Family: | Velvet Ant (Wasp: Mutillidae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Orange-banded Velvet Ant (Dasymutillini sp ES05) | ||||
| This Photo: | 🔍Female, dorsal🔎 | ||||
Thank you Dr Denis Brothers for identifying and Dr Kevin Williams for helping with the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere ~6mm head & body length. Has an orange band that wraps all the way round under with a black break on top. Black legs and a pale strip of hairs on the rear of it's abdomen. We asked Denis why he thought it wasn't Ephutomorpha sp and he said "True Ephutomorpha has the thorax more narrowed posteriorly, the shape of the first abdominal segment slightly different, and a pattern of pale setae on the second abdominal segment with the hairs directed towards the middle towards the posterior part of the segment. E. aurata and E. pulchella are true members of that genus. For a long time just about any mutillid from Australia was placed in Ephutomorpha, just because it was Australian, but most of them actually belong to other genera, only some of which have yet been described, leaving many described species still placed in Ephutomorpha in the old broad sense." | |||||
| |||||
| |||||