UPDATE: The insect pictured is a Spoonwing or Threadwing Lacewing, Daniel Marlos of WhatsThatBug and author of The Curious World of Bugs told me. He added that it may be Nemoptera bipennis, dependin on location. If the insect were seen in Europe or Western Asia, the chances are very good it is N. bipennis. Indeed, the photographer took the photo in Cephalonia.

He pointed out that I’d misclassified it based on those halteres, which aren’t halteres. “The error is in the insect order. Diptera is an order, not a family. Diptera is the family of flies, and halteres are the vestigial second pair of wings that are underdeveloped knob-like structures that are believed to serve to stabilize insects in flight. Most true flies have halteres, and the name Diptera refers to the fact that most flies only have two pairs of functioning wings. The thread or spoon wings on this lacewing are tails on the hind wings, not halteres. The spoonwing thus belongs to the order Neuroptera, not Diptera.

Back to the main story: Image recognition is moving forward quickly, what with modern digital cameras “knowing” where to focus on faces in a frame, Picasa, Facebook and others discovering your friends in photographs and now Google search by image. I’ve been playing with the latter tool and it is quite intriguing although by no means even close to perfect. Look at this example for instance. It’s a photo of an insect taken in Cephalonia by photographer Tim Bastable. He offered to share it with my Facebook fans in a kind of “name the insect” moment I’d started with a shot of a ladybug larva. I thought I’d be clever and try to use search by image to track down the identity of this invertebrate species. This is what I got:

To me, that looks as if Search by Image is merely looking at the hues or the histogram and finding images that vaguely match. To narrow the search, you can “describe” the photo, so I did. Most succinct description is “winged insect” and that gives:

But that didn’t hit it either. So, I added “Cephalonia”, which is where the photo was taken: no results.

Hmmm…

Nessa Carson chipped in with the suggestion that it might be a kind of caddisfly…at this point we’re stuck. I will update later.

Tim added a clue: “it was a very delicate insect – wings almost translucent – I took the shot on a beach, close to fresh water and a very diverse flora”.