FNZ 17 - Mymaridae (Insecta: Hymenoptera) - Introduction
Noyes, JS; Valentine, EW 1989. Mymaridae (Insecta: Hymenoptera). Fauna of New Zealand 17, 100 pages.
(
ISSN 0111-5383 (print),
;
no.
17.
ISBN 0-477-02542-0 (print),
).
Published 28 Apr 1989
ZooBank: http://zoobank.org/References/1D0A405D-6643-42DB-B911-80664BC6F853
Introduction
The Mymaridae (or 'fairy flies') include some of the smallest insects known. Some are less than 0.4 mm long, and thus are smaller than many unicellular protozoans. Their small size is not surprising because, so far as is known, mymarids develop only as parasitoids within the eggs of other insects. Although all mymarids are small, some that occur in the Southern Hemisphere may reach a length of over 4 mm, and thus can be considered veritable giants of the mymarid world. The small size and delicate appearance of mymarids made them popular with amateur microscopists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some of the microscope slides made of them by people such as the English microscopist Fred Enock are considered by some to be objects of great beauty.
Adult mymarids are rather fragile, the body generally being slender and the wings narrow with an elongate marginal fringe. They effectively 'swim' through the air rather than fly, and their small size means that they can probably be carried great distances in the aerial plankton.
Their diminutive size also makes mymarids very difficult to collect and study. Consequently the mymarid faunas of all parts of the world are very incompletely known, and the true diversity of the group has yet to be ascertained. Not surprisingly, therefore, the classification of the group is still at an elementary stage. Many of the currently accepted genera are only weakly separated and may prove to be untenable when more species are known. Systematic and biological research on the Mymaridae up until 1984 has been reviewed recently by Huber (1986). The major taxonomic treatises on the group are those of Debauche (1948), Annecke & Doutt (1961), Peck et al. (1964), and Schauff (1984). Further works which should be of interest are those of Annecke (1961a), Debauche (1949), Enock (1909), Ghesquière (1942), Girault (1910, 1913a,b, 1915a,b), Graham (1982), Hincks (1950, 1952, 1959), Kryger (1950), Matthews (1986), New (1974, 1976), Ogloblin (1935, 1936, 1946, 1952, 1956, 1959a,b), Sahad & Hirashima (1984), Soyka (1949, 1956a, 1961), and Valentine (1971).
Within New Zealand, very little attention has been paid to the Mymaridae prior to the present study. Apart from the descriptions of new taxa by Gahan (1927), Hincks (1961), and Valentine (1971), published work has been limited almost totally to papers on two species of economic importance, Anaphes nitens and Anagrus arrnatus (see p. 10).
The present study is based on the collections that have accumulated in the New Zealand Arthropod Collection, held by DSIR's Entomology Division in Auckland, and on material collected during an extensive Malaise trap and sweep-net survey in both the North and South islands during 1980 and 1981. It is intended only as an introduction to the Mymaridae occurring in New Zealand; a complete revision is beyond the scope of the present work, owing mainly to a lack of well preserved material.
When studying the New Zealand mymarid fauna we made every attempt to include the New Zealand species in the ninety or so described world genera of mymarids that are presently considered valid (see Noyes 1978, Huber 1986). Some difficulty was experienced in placing certain flightless species in previously recognised genera because many are defined on features of the wings. Further to this, reduction of the wings has occasionally led to structural simplification of the thorax and fusion of many of the sclerites, e.g., in a species here placed in Cleruchus Enock. Most genera have been described from the Neotropical, Holarctic, and Afrotropical regions, and thus it often proved impossible to place the New Zealand species without unrealistically altering the limits of these genera. Therefore, to accommodate these species, we found it necessary to propose seventeen new genera in the present review. For each of them only the type species is described in order to validate the generic name. Eight of these genera are presently monotypic, four are known to contain at least two species, and five contain three or more species. We believe that the genera we propose reflect discrete natural groupings of species. We believe also that we have been conservative in proposing these new genera. For instance, other workers may consider that the two largest species placed by us in Australomymar (see Fig. 49 and 50) require placement in two other, as yet undescribed, genera. Most of the material used in the present study was obtained from a limited survey of New Zealand chalcids conducted in 1980-81. The study of additional material will certainly yield many more species belonging to these new genera.
All primary type material of the species described here is deposited in NZAC.