THE NEUROPTERA OF SUFFOLK.
THE
NEUROPTERA
OF
181
SUFFOLK.
one or more of our Members devote a few years exclusively to the investigation of the local Spring-tails, Psocids, Stone-flies, May-flies, Dragon-flies and Caddis-flies that go to constitute the Order Neuroptera, we shall obtain but an inadequate knowledge of Suffolk kinds. The present preparatory Catalogue is tendered as a mere basis for future work, and an incentive to further study, for it embraces less than half the British species thus :— UNTIL
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Collembola Thysanura Ps.-Neuroptera Perlidae Ephemeridae ... Odonata P l a n i p e n n i a ... Trichoptera ...
Brit. 54 4 43 29 39 43 57 174 443
Suffolk. 10 2 29 10 7 25 38 76 197 species
The disparity in relative numbers is owing far more to the difhculty in correct naming than to lack of the insects themselves, for our County is so well watered that we lack nothing but swift-flowing streams and mountain torrents to cover the whole of the aquatic kinds' natural home : ponds, broads, rivers and brackish-water on the coast are all one could desire. These eight divisions are heterogeneous, yet conveniently treated in common from a faunistic view-point. The modern tendency is to separate ; but, in doing so, one gains nothing in natural systematics and merely multiplies Orders. McLachlan's 1870 Catalogue of British Neuroptera (revised at Trans. Ent. Soc. 1882) includes the whole, excepting only Collembola and Thysanura, regarded as not Insects by Westwood but treated as the ancestral type of insect by Lubbock's Monograph on the group, published by the Ray Society in 1873 : their affinities are certainly with Pseudo-Neuroptera, of which family Hagen records Suffolk species in the Entomologist's Annual of 1861. Of Perlidce no monograph exists but W. H. Nunney's "British Stone Flies" (Science Gossip 1892, pp. 35-51), largely drawn from Prof. Pictet's Histoire des Perlides : Suffolk's paucity is owing to our lack of fastflowing streams, for around Killarney we have taken great numbers. Our Member, Mr. Blair, published a " List of the British Ephemeroptera " in Entom. during 1930 ; they are abundant upon all our Suffolk rivers. Our Odonata seu Dragon Flies were printed at Trans. Suff. Nat. Soc. i, p. 19. An " Entomologist List of British Neuroptera " of 1929 embraces