INSECTA MUNDI A Journal of World Insect Systematics 0352 The diversity and distributions of the beetles (Insecta: Coleoptera) of the Guadeloupe Archipelago (Grande-Terre, Basse-Terre, La Désirade, Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, and Petite-Terre), Lesser Antilles Stewart B. Peck Department of Biology Carleton University 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada Michael C. Thomas Florida State Collection of Arthropods Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services P.O. Box 147100 Gainesville, FL 32614-7100, USA Robert H. Turnbow, Jr. 59 Brookview Ct. Enterprise, AL 36330, USA Date of Issue: February 21, 2014 CENTER FOR SYSTEMATIC ENTOMOLOGY, INC., Gainesville, FL Stewart B. Peck, Michael C. Thomas, and Robert H. Turnbow, Jr. The diversity and distributions of the beetles (Insecta: Coleoptera) of the Guadeloupe Archipelago (Grande-Terre, Basse-Terre, La Désirade, Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, and Petite-Terre), Lesser Antilles Insecta Mundi 0352: 1–156 ZooBank Registered: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:CFE41E68-A725-4D3B-99CE-FF4EF6D224B9 Published in 2014 by Center for Systematic Entomology, Inc. P. O. Box 141874 Gainesville, FL 32614-1874 USA http://centerforsystematicentomology.org/ Insecta Mundi is a journal primarily devoted to insect systematics, but articles can be published on any non-marine arthropod. Topics considered for publication include systematics, taxonomy, nomenclature, checklists, faunal works, and natural history. Insecta Mundi will not consider works in the applied sciences (i.e. medical entomology, pest control research, etc.), and no longer publishes book reviews or editorials. 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Archived digitally by Portico. Florida Virtual Campus: http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/insectamundi University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Digital Commons: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/insectamundi/ Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-135240 Author instructions available on the Insecta Mundi page at: http://centerforsystematicentomology.org/insectamundi/ Copyright held by the author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Com- mons, Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/3.0/ 0352: 1-156 2014 The diversity and distributions of the beetles (Insecta: Coleoptera) of the Guadeloupe Archipelago (Grande-Terre, Basse-Terre, La Désirade, Marie-Galante, Les Saintes, and Petite-Terre), Lesser Antilles Stewart B. Peck Department of Biology Carleton University 1125 Colonel By Drive Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, CANADA [email protected] Michael C. Thomas Florida State Collection of Arthropods Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services P.O. Box 147100 Gainesville, FL 32614-7100, USA [email protected] Robert H. Turnbow, Jr. 59 Brookview Ct. Enterprise, AL 36330, USA [email protected] Abstract. The Guadeloupe Archipelago, the French overseas Département de Guadeloupe, is a geographically associ- ated group of islands and a natural biogeographic unit. The islands have been available for terrestrial colonization since the late Tertiary. From the viewpoint of beetle systematics and biodiversity, this is the most important set of islands of the Lesser Antilles because more species have been described or recorded from Guadeloupe than any other island or group in the Lesser Antilles. We present a summary of the 1338 beetle species recorded in the literature from the archipelago, in 60 families, and 719 genera. The families with the largest numbers of species are Curculionidae (420), Staphylinidae (153), Chrysomelidae (75), Cerambycidae (69), Scarabaeidae (64), and Tenebrionidae (59). Four hundred eighty two species are known only from one or more islands of the Guadeloupe group and likely speciated there. Guadeloupe is the type locality for an additional 59 species. At least 61 species have been accidentally intro- duced by human activities. A total of 261 species are known only from the Lesser Antilles including Guadeloupe. The remaining species are naturally more widespread in the Lesser Antilles, or the West Indies, and elsewhere in the New World. The actual number of species on the Guadeloupe Archipelago is estimated to be around 1850 or more species. Introduction The islands of the Caribbean are recognized as a “hotspot” for species biodiversity (Myers et al. 2000, Myers 2003, Mittermeier et al. 2004, Conservation International 2010a). This generalization is mostly based on data for only a few better-known groups such as vascular plants, terrestrial vertebrates and butterflies (Ricklefs and Lovette 1999). In reality, the terrestrial animal groups that are the most species diverse are the insect orders Diptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and especially Coleoptera (the beetles). These alone are estimated to account for some 20% or more of all the world’s animal species known to science (Wilson 1992). The goal and purpose of this report is to provide a summary and analysis of the species and distributions of all published records of the beetle fauna of the Guadeloupe Archipelago. This is a contribution to a longterm project to understand the diversity, evolution, and distribution of the beetles of the Lesser Antilles. The Islands Physical geography. The islands of the Guadeloupe Archipelago lie in the Leeward Islands group, in the upper half of the Lesser Antilles chain of islands of the West Indies (Fig. 1). Politically, the islands are 1 2 • INSECTA MUNDI 0352, February 2014 PECK ET AL. Figure 1. The islands of the central and eastern West Indies and adjacent continental land masses, showing in the east the main island arc of the Lesser Antilles and the location of the Guadeloupe Archipelago. an overseas Département of France. They are a political unit of France equivalent to the status of Hawaii in the USA. All is French in language, customs, laws, etc., and there is also a creole language. The Archipelago is located between 15°50’ to 16°31’ N latitude and 61°00’ to 61°48’ W longitude. It lies be- tween the islands of Montserrat (53 km to the northwest) and Dominica (35 km to the south-southeast). It is composed of the main pair of islands of Grande-Terre and Basse-Terre which are collectively called Guadeloupe and the smaller satellite islands of Marie-Galante and La Désirade, and five small islands collectively called Les Saintes, and two smaller islands collectively called Îlets de Petite-Terre (Fig. 2). With an area of 1434 km2 (554 mi 2) bipartite Guadeloupe is the largest island in the Lesser Antilles. The two main islands of Guadeloupe are of nearly similar size: the eastern one of Grande-Terrre is of lower elevation and the western one of Basse-Terre is mountainous. These two islands are separated by the 50 m wide sea water gap called ‘la Rivière Salée’. The terrain is punctuated by hills, plateaus, and mountains. The maximum elevation of 1467 m is at the summit of la Soufrière volcano, Basse-Terre, the highest point in the Lesser Antilles. Guadeloupe is a tropical island which has been heavily altered by clearing for large and small scale agriculture (especially on Grande-Terre), but with a significant area of coastal mangrove and regenerating or little-disturbed lowland seasonal (xeric and humid) forest and submontane wet forest (especially on Basse-Terre). There are two geophysical groupings of islands in the Archipelago. 1). The low and drier islands of Grande-Terre, La Désirade, Marie-Galante