Big fan of the spinny mechanism 🙂‍↕️

Taking this as a sign that I should just change my dissertation to gifs of every specimen I have in this state

I'm currently IDing about 1200 specimens from malaise in Madagascar and sorting them into genus or morphotype so my eye is practiced at this point haha!! If you want to send photos of the tarsi, mouthparts, and antennae I can get them to family at least

Nah it's honestly just really fun haha—at the most, one practical thing with it was making sure things are actually on the same enough plane for me to measure them in the figure reliably

If you need help IDing or describing 👀👀👀

Thank you for your interest :) Here's a male Xenos peckii for luck haha!

Over here in New York and in California I've had the best luck with vespids and sphecids on goldenrod, especially in Polistes spp. since they tend to be superparasitized. They're a lot easier to check than hoppers for stylopization while alive since parasitized ones fly a bit punch-drunk haha.

In NZ you might have best luck sweeping for leafhoppers (Stephen Thorpe on iNat has apparently captured a whole bunch of coriophagids in the cicadellid Novothymbris notata)! Other strepsipterans that infect hoppers are also known to come to UV and mercury vapor light traps so that might work.

Oh sure, thanks for asking! I'd recommend seeking out and collecting a ton of the hosts primarily—the streps that I've collected were always housed in their hosts, and any males I've captured on film were reared out of their hosts.