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| Insects of Britain and Ireland: the families of Hymenoptera |
Sawflies.
Adults medium sized; 10–13 mm long.
Head. Sub-antennal grooves absent. Antennal segments ‘many segmented’. The antennal flagellum serrate via distinctly produced segments.
Thorax. Pronotum more or less straight at the back. Cenchri present. Fore-wings with the venation well developed. Hind tibiae without specialised spurs.
Abdomen. The abdomen broadly sessile at its base, without a marked constriction. Ovipositor of females adapted as a saw.
Larvae. Larvae with segmented legs; phytophagous (gregarious, in webs on herbaceous plants).
General comments. Broad bodied insects, the body dorso-ventrally flattened; second abdominal tergite not divided along the mid-line and the mouthparts as long as the head capsule, by contrast with Pamphilidae.
British representation. Species in Britain 3 (all only dubiously British); Megalodontes.
Classification. Suborder Symphyta; Superfamily Megalodontoidea.
Illustrations. • Megalodontes plagiocephalus (Cameron II, vi). 10a. antenna; 10b, maxilla; 10c, labium; 10d, leg. female.
We advise against extracting comparative information from the descriptions. This is much more easily achieved using the DELTA data files or the interactive key, which allows access to the character list, illustrations, full and partial descriptions, diagnostic descriptions, differences and similarities between taxa, lists of taxa exhibiting or lacking specified attributes, and distributions of character states within any set of taxa. See also Guidelines for using data taken from Web publications.
Cite this publication as: ‘Watson, L., and Dallwitz, M.J. 2003 onwards. Insects of Britain and Ireland: the families of Hymenoptera. Version: 14th April 2022. delta-intkey.com’.
