#4
Chloropidae, Oscinellinae: Elachiptera bimaculata (Loew, 1845). This typical species is an abundant chloropid in Southern and SE Europe and North Africa, also being recorded from many islands from Madeira, the Acores, Canary Islands, Balears, Giglio, Malta, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, Cyprus, occurring eastwards all over the Ukraine, Crimea, Turkey, Israel and the Near East. But nonetheless the climate warming, only few findings are available from Austria, The Netherlands and Germany. It has been obtained from a bird nest (on Malta) and the writer caught it in masses in ditches and swamps of the Mediterranean, covered with water-cress (Nasturtium officinale = Rorippa nasturtium-aquaticum) though Elachiptera species normally develop in monocot plants. It is a very variably coloured species; here a light form was photographed.