ABSTRACT
The holly leaf-miner is a tiny fly of the Phytomiza genus with an oddly ungregarious lifestyle. The female lays her eggs in the centre of the leaf in June and shortly afterwards the tiny larva hatches out. For the next nine months the junior Phytomiza, burrowed mole-like into the soft green tissue below the surface, chews its way stolidly out towards the peripheries of the leafblade until it reaches its full size, about three millimetres long, in the following March. It then prepares its escape hatch, a thin triangle of tissue cut into the skin of the leaf. Here it pupates, emerging as an adult fly in late May and leaving behind it a small flap on the leaf surface.
