Broad Damsel Bug Nabis flavomarginatus

It's always a bit disconcerting when the first example you find of a species doesn't look like it's meant to. This individual is considerably longer-winged than normal for the species. The species can be macropterous with wings extending beyond the apex of the abdomen (which they don't here) but macropterous forms are meant to be really rare in the UK. On this one the membrane of the wings was damaged but had they been complete they would have fallen short of the apex of the abdomen, so I guess it's intermediate between macropterous and brachypterous forms. After a fair bit of searching I only managed to find a couple of photos of similar individuals online (I don't think either were in the UK) so it caused me to seriously question whether my initial ID could be correct, but (a) nothing else seems to fit and (b) apart from the wing length being atypical nothing else seems to be wrong.

I keyed it using Kirby's draft key (2015) and everything checked out for flavomarginatus. I've not seen either limbatus or lineatus since having access to this key so hadn't seen the small, shining, depressed, micro-reticulate area in the anterior corners of the scutellum (common to flavomarginatus, limbatus and lineatus) before and wasn't sure exactly how this should appear. However I have looked hard for these depressions when keying other Nabis species that don't have them, and unlike those it was pretty obvious that this did have a depression in the corners of the scutellum that matched the description. Even so, just to cover all bases I did consider each of the other Nabis species but the proportions of the pronotum or other characters ruled all of those out. So with the long wing hairs ruling out Himacerus and scutellum ruling out most of the Nabis species, I'd narrowed it down to flavomarginatus, limbatus and lineatus. Finally the black tergites with golden pubescence and contrasting yellowish connexivum meant it had to be flavomarginatus.

female Broad Damsel Bug Nabis flavomarginatus (with Ant Damsel Bug Himacerus mirmicoides to its left in fourth photo) showing scutellum (with close-up of corner) and top of abdomen, Wendling Beck Environment Project (Norfolk, UK), 25th August 2025