Lissocephala versicolor (Diptera: Drosophilidae)—high resolution diagnostic images

One hundred years ago in 1924–1925, P. A. Buxton, G. H. E. Hopkins, and E. H. Bryan collected in the South Pacific on the Expedition of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Material collected in the Samoan Islands was placed in both the then British Museum Natural History, London and in the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu. Among those specimens, Malloch (1934, Insects of Samoa, London 6: 267–328) identified a new species of Lissocephala Malloch, 1929, a genus he had erected earlier for the reception of an African species in which the frons was entirely smooth and glossy. He named the Samoan species Lissocephala versicolor accepting it to be congeneric with the African species. Noteworthy, is the smooth glossy frons without dull groves (frontal vittae) between the frontal triangle and the fronto-orbital plate (Fig. 2 and McEvey 2022: fig. 6). Malloch (1934: 288) further described the frons as “sharp on vertex, the posterior ocelli situated on its edge” (Fig. 2), and, concerning the thorax, he wrote “presutural bristle long, basal pair of scutellars about one-third as long as the apical pair” (see presut s Fig. 7). Additional specimens, now in the Australian Museum, Sydney, were collected in 2003 in Samoa (Vailima and Vaea, Upolu—type locality of L. versicolor) during a study of the Drosophila ananassae complex by the author with Malcolm Schug, Shelly Gray Smith, and Michael M. Marshall. Unlike L. metallescens (de Meijere) and L. fijiensis Harrison, L. versicolor has a pale katepisternum and a black haltere (see detailed images of other Australian Region species in McEvey 2026a,b,c,d). A minute proepisternal seta, not mentioned previously, is present in most (e.g., Fig. 7) but not all (e.g., Fig. 6) specimens of L. versicolor.