H. Takaoka, The Black Flies (Diptera: Simuliidae) of Sulawesi, Maluki and Irian Jaya, Kyushu University Press, 2003

摘要

Until recently, the fauna of black flies (family Simuliidae) of the Indo-Malayan (Oriental) Region was least studied as compared to the faunas of other zoogeographic regions. While the species composition of the Palaearctic, and somewhat later, Nearctic has been intensively studied since the XIX century, and the studies of black flies in Africa and tropic America flourished in the middle of the XX century (especially in connection with their role as vectors of human on-chocercosis, within a long-termWHO program), the black fly fauna of the Indo-Malayan Region remained poorly known. The number of known species in this region was smaller than in all the other regions (with the exception of Australian Region), which obviously did not reflect the actual diversity of Simuliidae in the Oriental fauna. There were no general faunistic reviews for the Indo-Malayan Region. The situation began drastically changing 25-30 years ago. Faunistic reviews of this family first appeared for Taiwan (Takaoka, 1979), then the Philippines (Takaoka, 1983), Thailand (Takaoka and Suzuki, 1984), Sri Lanka (Davies and Gyorkos, 1922, etc.), and Malaysia (Takaoka and Davies, 1996). Dr Takaoka was the author or co-author of almost all these publications. According to the latest data, the black fly fauna of the Indo-Malayan and Australian Regions includes more than 500 species and is hardly inferior to that of the Palaearctic, which has been studied much longer and in greater detail by a greater number of specialists.