07 Wednesday Jan 2026
Deep-diving in leaf litter has become a favourite pastime when the days are short, the birds aren’t showing themselves, and the insects are few … except in the wet muddy depths of the decaying leaves where so many spend their winters as larvae, and where adult springtails abound. This springtail, Orchesella cincta, which had crawled from the leaf litter on to a metal fence, was a new find for me in December.
06 Monday Feb 2023
Another day, another fly larva from my riffling through the leaf litter.
This was last Friday’s find, once again discovered amongst soggy Sycamore leaves. My go-to guy on Twitter tells me this is one of the Phaonia species of flies, and he wrote that this larva is ‘a ferocious predator that can be found throughout the winter in leaf litter. Goes after anything that it can pierce with its mouthparts.’ Beware ferocious fly larvae!
12 Thursday Jan 2023
Posted in insects
Well, I’m not often right but I’m wrong again! So, when is a wiglet not a wiglet? When it’s a ground beetle, one of the Carabidae family. After reading Tuesday’s post, the top local biodiversity recorder sent me a message, saying he thought the juvenile insect was a ground beetle (thank you, Graham) and, after googling, I believe he’s absolutely right.
My photos didn’t really do the tiny creature justice – you can see some amazing macro images by photographer Paul Iddon, especially of its impressive mouth parts, on the Open Photography Forums website. Also, while googling I found an article on the website of the University of Kentucky, Recognizing Insect Larval Types, which includes excellent information and diagrams to aid identification of insect in their early stages of life. Some of the terminology is American but it’s well worth a look if you’re interested in the subject, and there’s a downloadable pdf.
10 Tuesday Jan 2023
Did you know juvenile earwigs are called wiglets? I didn’t until I started looking online for images, trying to verify if this really is a juvenile earwig. I’m still not 100% sure but, with those hind pincers, what else could it be? This find was another from my recent leaf-turning adventures.
If you’re interested in earwigs and their relatives, the website Orthoptera and allied insects has some excellent downloadable identification guides for grasshoppers, crickets, earwigs, cockroaches and stick-insects. I have contacted them about my wiglet.
07 Saturday Jan 2023
Tags
fly larva, fly larva on Sycamore leaf, insects in leaf litter, Lauxaniidae, Lauxaniidae larva, leaf-turning, Sycamore leaves
During Wednesday’s walk I spent a little time turning over soggy Sycamore leaves in a small wooded area, hoping for hoverly larvae but just as keen to see what other miniscule beasties might be living in the leaf litter (there were loads). I thought I’d struck pay dirt with this find but was later advised by a hoverfly expert that this is, in fact, a fly larva, one of the Lauxaniidae family of small flies. I’d never really thought about fly larvae before and assumed, before this find, that they were all a bit like the wriggling white maggots you find on rotting meat, so this was a nice surprise. I will be turning over more leaves very soon.
earthstar 
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