Sciaridae (Amorim, 1992)

Sciaridae View in CoL View at ENA

The family Sciaridae includes over 2,700 described species worldwide in more than 80 genera. The actual number of species known, however, is far below the actual diversity of the family. The BIN count for Sciaridae found by Hebert et al. (2016) in the Nearctic region is nearly 75 times the number of described species in the region; Srivathsan et al. (2023) studied the species composition of 39 Malaise trap samples in five biogeographic regions, eight countries, and numerous habitats, and found sciarids as the sixth most speciose in a set of 20 insect families that account for over half of the species diversity. There are almost 200 described Neotropical species of Sciaridae ( Amorim 1992) , of which 91 are known for Brazil. The concept of the many genera of sciarids has changed over the last 40 years (see, e.g., Mohrig and Menzel 2014) and most old keys for the genera of the family are not adequate for the Neotropical fauna. For the time being, the key in Mohrig and Menzel (2009) is the most adequate to identify the Brazilian fauna of Sciaridae .

Brief perceptions of Linnean and Wallacean shortfalls in the Brazilian fauna

An overall view of the species-richness of the Bibionomorpha families in Brazil is summarized in Table 1 and a comparison between the Brazilian known diversity and the Neotropical general diversity of these families is summarized in Table 2. The distributional data of these families resulted in maps based on a political division by states, including the Federal District ( Fig. 1 A-K) and on biomes for Bibionomorpha , in general, and Bibionidae , Cecidomyiidae , Lygistorrhinidae , Mycetophilidae , and Sciaridae ( Fig. 2 A-F).