Chloropidae

Bazyar, Zeinab, Dousti, Abu Fazel, Tschirnhaus, Michael Von, Received, Majid Fallahzadeh & Online, Published, 2015, A first overview of the fauna of Chloropidae of Iran (Diptera, Acalyptratae), Turkish Journal of Zoology 39 (6), pp. 1041-1049 : 1041

1.1. Published records on Iranian Chloropidae

Afshar (1938) was the first Persian entomologist to report a chloropid pest species, Chlorops pumilionis , from Iran. Later researchers, although not specialists in this family, reported some widely distributed species from Iran in their books on applied entomology. Behdad (1993), Modarres Awal (1997), and Khanjani (2005) tried to collate these records for inclusion in their books. We could not find some papers and books cited by them; thus, their citations are not repeated here. Before 2001, no one had seriously focused their interest on all Chloropidae of Iran. Abivardi (2001) summarized all aspects of Iranian entomology based on an impressive Iranian bibliography, but without a chloropid article.

Earlier studies in Iran have not covered the Chloropidae systematically. This paper presents new discoveries and the first rather limited Iranian overview, dealing with 20 genera and 50 species. The genera and species are arranged alphabetically within 2 subfamilies, disregarding their phylogenetic order. In view of the extremely diverse Iranian landscapes and habitats, we are sure that many more species of Chloropidae await discovery and identification in this country, especially if Malaise traps and colored pan traps are used for a whole year in faunistic surveys. Based on comparison with the well-investigated Central European countries, we estimate that at least 200 species of Chloropidae may be found in Iran. Similar overviews have been made recently for adjacent countries such as Turkey (Nartshuk, 2012) and Greece ( Nartshuk, 2010), both with numbers of species close to the number found in this paper. In addition, Nartshuk (2010) expected to find a number of Greek species similar to that of our expectations. Finally, 31 identified and 2 unidentified species were recorded from southwestern Saudi Arabia (belonging to the Palearctic region) ( Dawah and Abdullah, 2006). This paper records many genera and species not yet found in Iran.