Cryptophagidae (Coleoptera) in the collections of Ukraine: Species, Specimens, and Collectors

Abstract

The collections of Cryptophagidae beetles stored in the natural museums of Ukraine were studied: three academic and two university collections – State Museum of Natural History, National Museum of Natural History and I.I. Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Zoological Museum of T. Shevchenko Kyiv National University and Museum of Natural History of V. Karazin Kharkiv National University, and also author’s work collection. The volumes and the state of their preservation have been analyzed. The representation of different species in collections, as a whole, and in relation to the Carpathian fauna is evaluated. In general, museum collections contain 1346 samples of Cryptophagids, in each of which – about 210-340 individuals, all of them are stored in separate boxes and punctured by entomologic needles. The author's collection includes 1657 specimens of 57 species, which are mostly stored on cotton mattresses. All six collections include 122 species of 16 genera, containing from 21 to 85 species of this family. Some samples in collections have been lost for various reasons, in 10 cases there are only needles with labels without the samples themselves, therefore, some species (eg Cryptophagus nitidulus, C. hexagonalis) are represented in collections conditionally, only in labels. At the revision of materials attention is paid to taxonomic changes, through which in the publications and in the actual material different species or generic synonymic names were used. The author also took into account the uniqueness of each of the collections, which was determined by several important parameters, including the number of samples that are presented exclusively in some of the museum of species and genera of the family, the number of samples and type specimens in collection. For most of these parameters the leader is the collection of Zoological Museum of T. Shevchenko Kyiv National University. All data is included in the author's database, which contains summaries of annotations containing collections of samples, names of regions and localities of collection, dates, collectors, or owners of the collection, and also notes with clarifications of places or details of reidentifications.