120 Years in 120 Objects
Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight to the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!
Today’s Object is from 1970
Hanging Flies: Jason Londt’s first publication by Mandisa Ndlovu, Research Technician, Natural Sciences
Jason Londt, who would go on to become one of South Africa’s leading entomologists, published his first scientific article in 1970. The article was a description of Bittacus tjederi, a species belonging to the order Mecoptera. While his research focus was the taxonomy of Afrotropical Asilidae, he also contributed to the taxonomy of Mecoptera and collected impressive numbers of other Diptera and Hemiptera. He published over a dozen papers on Mecoptera during his career, describing a genus as well as 16 species and re-describing six species that created new synonymies.
The order Mecoptera is a small group of insects represented by a single family in the Afrotropics, the Bittacidae. There are currently three genera in the region, the monotypic Anomalobittacus Kimmins, (described in 1928), Afrobittacus Londt (described in 1994), and the largest genus Bittacus Latreille (described in 1805). While Bittacus can be common, adults often only fly for short periods, meaning that many regional lists underestimate the true species richness and so opportunities for expanding our knowledge exist in many regions. Mecoptera are also known as hanging flies. They are predators and spend much of their time hanging by their front legs with their rear legs dangling in the air to catch unsuspecting insects that fly by.
Bittacus tjederi constitutes a distinctive species of hanging flies which is distributed between Makhanda and Citrusdal in the southern parts of South Africa (Londt 1978). The Bittacus tjederi holotype was found in South Africa (Cape: Goedehoop [farm] Heidelberg District - 34°05'S:20057'E).
B. tjederi collected in 1969 (Image by Mandisa Ndlovu)
