Eupliloides sinharajae Leclercq 1983

Eupliloides sinharajae Leclercq

This species is known only from Sri Lanka where it occurs as follows.

Amparai District: Ekgal Aru Reservoir

Kandy District: Kandy, Udawattakele Sanctuary

Colombo District: Mirigama Scout Camp and Labugama Reservoir

Kegalla District: Kitulgala

Ratnapura District: Gilimale and Weddagala

Galle District: Kanneliya

The altitudes are 10–610 m, and the average annual rainfall is 1650–5000 mm. All are in the Wet Zone except Ekgal Aru in the Dry Zone.

We excavated two nests of this slender black wasp in the Kanneliya section of the Sinharaja Jungle on 4 October 1980. The nests were in a vertical bank along a logging road through the rain forest.

The first nest suggested that construction and provisioning of a nest may be a rather protracted affair. The burrow was 2 mm in diameter, went upward at an angle of 20° for 20 mm, then went downward at an angle of about 20° for 50 mm. The first cell was halfway down the descending axis of the burrow and about 10 mm below the burrow. It held a delicate fusiform cocoon, 6 mm long and 2 mm in diameter, containing a wasp pupa. The second cell was about 10 mm farther down the burrow at the end of a short lateral tunnel. It contained a full grown wasp larva. The mother wasp was in a third cell at the end of the burrow. This cell also contained two paralyzed flies, 1.1 and 3.5 mm long, respectively Culicoides jacobsoni Macfie (Ceratopogonidae) and a species of Dolichopodidae.

The burrow of the second nest was 2 mm in diameter, went upward for 25 mm at an angle of 30°, then quite steeply downward for 45 mm along a small stone. The nest contents were disturbed when we removed the stone. We recovered four specimens of Dolichopodidae, 1.3–2.4 mm long, belonging to different genera, and two sausage-shaped wasp eggs, 2.2 mm long and 0.9 mm in diameter.

I also collected a sinharajae pair visiting a pair of extrafloral nectaries on the upper surface near the attachment of the petiole of a cordate leaf of kenda, Macaranga digyna (Roxburgh), a euphorbiaceous shrub. This was near Weddagala in the Sinharaja Jungle during the period 8–12 February 1977.