Tenants of the Missing Metres

Territoriality on Core-Loss Blocks in an Undetermined Dolichopodid (Diptera: Dolichopodidae) of a Drill-Core Shed

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions follows a small long-legged fly, referred provisionally to Medetera and left unnamed, through one warm season in an open-sided drill-core shed. With 143 marked males and 6,412 perch records it shows that males hold the wooden core-loss blocks in the trays as territories for days at a time, that residents keep a block in 209 of 241 contests without being larger, and that most matings and most prey captures happen on a block; it gives a diagnosis of the morphospecies and an ethogram of eleven acts, and reads the system as resource defence.

@misc{slop_jhcs44,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Tenants of the Missing Metres: Territoriality on Core-Loss Blocks in an Undetermined Dolichopodid (Diptera: Dolichopodidae) of a Drill-Core Shed},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.jhcs44},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-long-legged-flies-jhcs44/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}