Marine Biodiversity of Costa Rica, Central America
This volume, compiling and updating the marine biodiversity information of Costa Rica, consists of species lists, and comments on the state-of-knowledge of most taxonomical groups. It contains information about collections and experts for each taxonomic g
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Marine Insects Monika Springer
Female (left) and male (right) of the seaskater, Halobates sobrinus (Photo: Bernald Pacheco)
I.S. Wehrtmann, J. Cortés (eds.) Marine Biodiversity of Costa Rica, Central America, © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009
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M. Springer
Abstract Although insects are one of the most diverse groups of organisms on earth, relatively few species are found associated with marine habitats. The majority of these marine species live in intertidal or coastal habitats and most of them belong to the orders Hemiptera, Diptera, and Coleoptera. Little is known about the marine insects of Central America and no survey of marine insect species has been carried out for Costa Rica. Therefore, this part presents a short discussion on each insect order with marine species that are most likely to occur in the area. Nearly nothing is known for the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. For the Pacific coast a species list is presented that includes one marine species of Collembola, and eight species from four families from the order Hemiptera. This last one is also the only order with truly pelagic insects, the sea skaters Halobates (Gerridae), able to permanently colonize the open ocean.
Introduction Insects constitute the most diverse and abundant group in the animal kingdom, being found in almost all habitats on earth. Given their unparalleled success in both terrestrial and freshwater environments, it is surprising that not more are found associated to marine habitats. There are more than 30,000 species of freshwater insects, but the number that can be considered marine amounts to only several hundreds (Cheng & Frank 1993; Williams & Feltmate 1992). The majority of these marine insect species are found in what have been termed “bridging habitats,” mainly mangrove swamps, estuaries, saltmarshes, and intertidal zones (Cheng 1976). Many of those species living in the intertidal zone are associated with detached and decaying seaweed or wrack on sandy beaches (Roth & Brown 1980). Physical features of the intertidal zone may have forced many insects to reside buried in sand or mud, or hide under seaweed or in crevices (Williams & Feltmate 1992). Some species might be quite abundant in these intertidal habitats, and most of them belong to the orders Diptera, Coleoptera, and Hemiptera (Roth & Brown 1980; Cheng & Frank 1993). Few species are truly submarine, like the larvae of Clunio and Pontomyia, in the family Chironomidae, Diptera (Neumann 1976). More than half of all insect orders include marine species, and the occurrence of the various insect orders in different marine habitats are given by Cheng and Frank (1993), and Cheng (2003), including Mallophaga (biting lice) and Anoplura (sucking lice), which live on marine mammals or seabirds. Few species can be considered truly marine, inhabiting the remote offshore regions of open oceans, all belonging to the genus of ocean striders or sea skaters, Halobates
M. Springer Escuela de Biología, Universidad de Costa Rica, San Pedro de Montes de Oca, 11501-20
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