Brian Brown

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County · Department of Entomology

A new species of phorid fly, Euryplatea nanaknihali (Diptera: Phoridae), is described from Thailand. This is the first Oriental Region record for this genus; it is otherwise known only from the type species from Africa, where it parasitizes ants of the genus Crematogaster Lund. The new species is probably capable of parasitizing the smallest host C...

Honey bee colonies are subject to numerous pathogens and parasites. Interaction among multiple pathogens and parasites is the proposed cause for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a syndrome characterized by worker bees abandoning their hive. Here we provide the first documentation that the phorid fly Apocephalus borealis, previously known to parasiti...

Parasitoids in the insect order Diptera include an estimated 16,000 species, or approximately 20% of the total number of species with this life-style. Parasitoids in this order are exceedingly diverse in both their habits and evolutionary origins, which makes them an underutilized but highly suitable group for quantitative studies of character conv...

When a vertebrate carcass begins its decay in terrestrial environments, a succession of different necrophagous arthropod species, mainly insects, are attracted. Trophic aspects of the Mesozoic environments are of great comparative interest, to understand similarities and differences with extant counterparts. Here, we comprehensively study several e...

True flies (Diptera) are a hyper-diverse group of insects which are considerably under-studied compared to many other organisms. Here we report a list of taxa collected during the 2019 Fly School held in San Luis Obispo County, California, a region of the California Floristic Province biodiversity hotspot. From June 20th to July 6th, an internation...

Docidiadia grimaldii sp. nov., the second known species in the genus, is described based on a holotype female and on a female paratype. The differences with D. burmitica Blagoderov & Grimaldi, the type-species of the genus, are discussed. The specimens allow the study of important details of the antenna, wing, and terminalia. The question of the co...

We review the species of Megaselia similar to Megaselia sulphurizona Borgmeier. A close examination of M. sulphurizona indicates that its current concept includes at least 16 species, 15 of which— Megaselia albizona, Megaselia borealizona, Megaselia colombizona, Megaselia cryptizona, Megaselia danizona, Megaselia guanizona, Megaselia marizona, Mega...

A collection of 16,521 barcoded phorid flies from Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica contains 1,498 recognized BINs (Barcode Index Numbers) in the BOLD database. These BINs were identified to genus, based on photographs, and the collection was found to be composed largely (893/1,498=60%) of specimens of the enormous ge...

Two new genera and four new species of metopinine phorid fly are described from Costa Rica. Macgrathphora new genus is described with the following new species: M. caribbea, M. longifurca, and M. pacifica. In particular, M. caribbea is one of the most abundant phorids collected in a recent inventory project in Northwestern Costa Rica. Aurisetiphora...

The Neotropical ant-parasitic genus Neodohrniphora Malloch is revised based on female specimens. Herein, eleven species are studied, seven of which are new to science: N. canina sp. nov., N. gigantea sp. nov., N. mokana sp. nov., N. pseudoacromyrmecis sp. nov., N. queirozi sp. nov., N. rapunzelae sp. nov., and N. truncata sp. nov. Neodohrniphora wa...

Tropical forests are among the most biodiverse biomes on the planet. Nevertheless, quantifying the abundance and species richness within megadiverse groups is a significant challenge. We designed a study to address this challenge by documenting the variability of the insect fauna across a vertical canopy gradient in a Central Amazonian tropical for...

Apocephalus borealis is a parasitoid of hymenopterans native to North America that also attacks introduced honey bees (Apis mellifera). Parasitism by this species has been associated with infested bees absconding the hive and dying outside. The flies can also harbour viral infections and nosematosis. Recently, nucleotide sequences identical to A. b...

Phorid flies are an abundant and diverse dipteran family in modern faunas, yet poorly represented in the fossil record. Here, we describe the first fossil species of the millipede parasitizing genus Myriophora, M. asiatica n. sp., and three new fossil species of the ant parasitizing genus Apocephalus, A. miocenus n. sp., A. dominicanus n. sp., and...

While bees are critical to sustaining a large proportion of global food production, as well as pollinating both wild and cultivated plants, they are decreasing in both numbers and diversity. Our understanding of the factors driving these declines is limited, in part, because we lack sufficient data on the distribution of bee species to predict chan...

Tropical rainforests are among the most diverse biomes on Earth. While species inventories are far from complete for any tropical rainforest, even less is known about the intricate species interactions that form the basis of these ecological communities. One fascinating but poorly studied example are the symbiotic associations between army ants and...

Here we respond to the criticisms leveled against a proposal that suggested an efficient solution to the taxonomic impediment. We clarify some of our objectives and demonstrate that many of the criticisms apply more to traditional approaches to taxonomy rather than to our minimalist approach.

Measuring species richness of tropical forests is a major challenge. Such measurement is a key information in many senses, from an evolutionary perspective to conservation of threatened, fragile habitats. Data has gradually shown that the canopy of tropical forest is a hugely complex component of the forest, but a precise assessment of the diversit...

Spiders are ubiquitous organisms in all but the most hostile terrestrial environments and are frequently encountered in urban areas. Assessing spider diversity in cities can require a significant investment of time and resources because the majority of the land is privately owned and fragmented into thousands of difficult-to-access properties. To o...

Three new genera are described: Michener (Proteropinae), Bioalfa (Rogadinae), and Hermosomastax (Rogadinae). Keys are given for the New World genera of the following braconid subfamilies: Agathidinae, Braconinae, Cheloninae, Homolobinae, Hormiinae, Ichneutinae, Macrocentrinae, Orgilinae, Proteropinae, Rhysipolinae, and Rogadinae. In these subfamili...

Diptera are one of the largest insect orders, with a wide variety of life histories, body structures, and wide biogeographic occurrence. Their importance to humans, both in negative and positive attributes, makes their understanding critical. Sampling projects for this group should minimally include Malaise traps, which are perhaps the most effecti...

A semi-automated identification system using wing venation is described for the large, taxonomically challenging genus Megaselia Rondani (Diptera: Phoridae). Wing photographs make two-dimensional images that can be landmarked and analysed to produce transformed (standardised) x–y coordinates, and are well suited for a semi-automated approach. We la...

Forty-one new species of the mostly neotropical genus Coniceromyia Borgmeier are described. The descriptions follow the methodology of recent works on the genus taxonomy and illustrate habitus, foremetatarsus, wing, hind femur, and hypopygium for each species. Unique features of some species are also illustrated, including several male features pos...

The Oriental Region phorid genus Epicnemis Borgmeier is revised, resulting in the recognition of 15 species, 10 of which are new to science: E. alus, chaweewanae, digitalis, disjunctus, dorsalis, latus, projectus, ratanae, setosus, and sinuosus. Only males are treated, as females are highly modified and cannot be associated with their males based o...

Phorid flies are amongst the most biologically diverse and species-rich groups of insects. Ways of life range from parasitism, herbivory, fungivory, to scavenging. Although the lifestyles of most species are unknown, many are parasitoids, especially of social insects. Some species of ant-parasitoids are attracted to injured hosts for feeding purpos...

Local community structure is shaped by processes acting at local and landscape scales. The relative importance of drivers operating across different spatial scales are difficult to test without observations across regional or latitudinal gradients. Cities exhibit strong but predictable environmental gradients overlaying a mosaic of highly variable...

A total of 2,545 specimens of scatopsids were collected by the BioSCAN project in Los Angeles, California, United States—an urban biodiversity project that worked with citizen scientists managing Malaise traps during 108 wk between September 2013 and October 2016. This is one of the largest collections of minute scavenger flies (Diptera: Scatopsida...

The urban heat island effect is a worldwide phenomenon that has been linked to species distributions and abundances in cities. However, effects of urban heat on biotic communities are nearly impossible to disentangle from effects of land cover in most cases because hotter urban sites also have less vegetation and more impervious surfaces than coole...

A lack of information about urban habitats, and a lack of professionally-collected species occurrence data are often cited as major impediments to completing bioassessments in urban landscapes. We developed an urban biodiversity assessment framework that addresses these challenges. The proposed framework combines a customized hierarchical urban hab...

Background The phorid fly genus Megaselia Rondani is a large, poorly-known taxon whose species are found worldwide. New information A new species of Megaselia Rondani, M.simunorum, is described from both urban and rural sites in southern California. With a large area of white colour on the posterior part of the abdominal dorsum, it closely resembl...

The seasonal migration of huge numbers of hoverflies is frequently reported in Europe from mountain passes or spurs of land. The movement of such large numbers of beneficial insects is thought to provide significant ecosystem services in terms of pollination and pest control. Observations from the East Coast of the USA during the 1920s indicate the...

The urban heat island effect is a worldwide phenomenon that has been linked to species distributions and abundances in cities. However, effects of urban heat on biotic communities are nearly impossible to disentangle from effects of land cover in most cases because hotter urban sites also have less vegetation and more impervious surfaces than coole...

By 2030, ten percent of earth’s landmass will be occupied by cities. Urban environments can be home to many plants and animals, but surveying and estimating biodiversity in these spaces is complicated by a heterogeneous built environment where access and landscaping are highly variable due to human activity. Citizen science approaches may be the be...

Trissolcushyalinipennis Rajmohana & Narendran is an Old World egg parasitoid of Bagradahilaris (Burmeister). Its potential as a classical biological control agent in the United States has been under evaluation in quarantine facilities since 2014. A survey of resident egg parasitoids using fresh sentinel B.hilaris eggs in Riverside, California, reve...

The phylogenetic relationships of the large, diverse genus Apocephalus Coquillett are studied using seven loci (16S, COI, NDI, 28S, AK, CAD, and TPI). Both Bayesian and Maximum Likelihood methods were used to analyze the sequences. Pre-existing taxonomic relationships, based on morphology, were largely upheld, with the notable exception of the subg...

Study of all flies (Diptera) collected for one year from a four-hectare (150 x 266 meter) patch of cloud forest at 1,600 meters above sea level at Zurquí de Moravia, San José Province, Costa Rica (hereafter referred to as Zurquí), revealed an astounding 4,332 species. This amounts to more than half the number of named species of flies for all of Ce...

Estimations of tropical insect diversity generally suffer from lack of known groups or faunas against which extrapolations can be made, and have seriously underestimated the diversity of some taxa. Here we report the intensive inventory of a four-hectare tropical cloud forest in Costa Rica for one year, which yielded 4332 species of Diptera, provid...

The newly-constructed Nature Gardens at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (California, USA) were purposefully built to attract wildlife. In this study we wanted to find out to what extent this manufactured environment is successful in attracting native insect fauna to the urban core of the city when compared to the surrounding neighb...

A sample of the 100 most cited papers on urban insect ecology from 2000-2017 is reviewed. This period represents the time since a call for more research on urban arthropods was raised by McIntyre (2000). Only literature on urbanization and its effects on insects were examined. Most studies concentrated on habitat suitability, beetles, butterflies,...

Estimations of tropical insect diversity generally suffer from lack of known groups or faunas against which extrapolations can be made, and have seriously underestimated the diversity of some taxa. Here we report the intensive inventory of a four-hectare tropical cloud forest in Costa Rica for one year, which yielded 4332 species of Diptera, provid...

When conservation strategies require new, field‐based information, practitioners must find the best ways to rapidly deliver high‐quality survey data. To address this challenge, several rapid assessment approaches have been developed since the early 1990s. These typically involve large areas, take many months to complete, and are not appropriate whe...

The first Opetiidae known from the Southern Hemisphere is described-Puyehuemyia chandleri, gen. nov., sp. nov.-based on a female specimen collected in Valdivian forest in the Province of Osorno, south Chile. The Palearctic species Opetia nigra Meigen was also studied, allowing detailed comparisons. Features of the antenna, mouthparts, wing, and ter...

Background Flies of the family Phoridae (Insecta: Diptera) are amongst the most diverse insects in the world, with an incredible array of species, structures and life histories. Wiithin their structural diversity is the world's smallest fly, Euryplateananaknihali Brown, 2012. New information A second minute, limuloid female phorid parasitoid fly (...

Caledophora gen. nov. is described based on two new species from New Caledonia, Caledophora irwini sp.nov. and Caledophora webbi sp.nov. This genus is similar to some genera from New Zealand, but can be differentiated from them by the combination of hypopygium not being expanded dorsoventrally, frons setation 4-4-4, light body colour and wing witho...

Male specimens of the phorid fly genus Dohrniphora Dahl from Miocene Mexican and Dominican amber are revised and described. This is the first systematic revision of the fossil species, and 11 new species are recognized from two Dohrniphora groups: those with and without large hind tibial setae. The group lacking hind tibial setae is notably more di...

A mysterious female phorid fly, known for many years to be associated with fungal sporophores ("mushrooms") is identified as Megaselia marquezi Hartop et al. 2015. Male and female flies were collected emerging from the fungus Psathyrella candolleana (Fr.) Maire, and females were observed swarming over the sporophores.

The first ever large-scale inventory of an urban phorid fly fauna is described. Collections from 30 Malaise traps from urban Los Angeles over one year from the BioSCAN Project document the presence of 99 species from 42,480 specimens identified. Species accumulation curves predict 102–106 species actually occurring in this area. Collections are ove...

Toxic defensive secretions produced by millipedes in the orders Julida, Spirobolida, Spirostreptida, and Polydesmida are highly repellent to most vertebrate and invertebrate natural enemies, but a few insects have evolved mechanisms to overcome these defenses. We demonstrate that highly specialized parasitic phorid flies in the species-rich genus M...

Myriophora is the most species-rich group of parasitoids that attack toxic, chemically defended millipedes in the superorder Juliformia and order Polydesmida—a resource that few insect predators and parasitoids are able to exploit. Worldwide, there are an estimated 200 species of Myriophora, with the majority of the diversity centred in the Neotrop...

Background Numerous well-documented associations occur among species of scuttle flies (Diptera: Phoridae) and ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), but examples of brood parasitism are rare and the mechanisms of parasitism often remain unsubstantiated. New information We present two video-documented examples of ant brood (larvae and pupae) parasitism by...

A second species, and first Central American record, of the phorid fly genus Lenkoa Borgmeier (Diptera: Phoridae). Many species of phorid flies have wingless or brachypterous females. Mostly, they belong to a group classified within the subfamily Metopininae corresponding to the Metopina group of genera of Brown (1992a) or the tribe Metopinini of D...

The Phoridae recorded from Colombia are catalogued, totaling 226 species distributed in 19 genera and three subfamilies. For each species, distribution, hierarchic position and cited references are presented.

The external portion of Atta cephalotes nests is composed of three areas: openings, trails, and cutting; where cutting and transporting leaves, sharing information, and defending the nest take place. The richness of the fauna of these areas is not only dependent on the interactions among ants, but also the accumulation of plant material and nest wa...

Fossil phorid flies display various levels of morphological change that are correlated with myrmecophily (association with ants) and termitophily (association with termites) in the modern fauna. Three discrete episodes in the evolution of limuloidy, a defensive body form, are documented from Eocene Baltic amber. Extinct fossil stem-group taxa of th...

Background: Presented are continued results from the BioSCAN Project, an urban biodiversity study sampling primarily from private backyards in Los Angeles, California (USA). Presented are continued results from the BioSCAN Project, an urban biodiversity study sampling primarily from private backyards in Los Angeles, California (USA). New informat...