Fauna lepidopterologica Volgo-Uranensis

Over 25 years ago the project of collaborative work devoted
to the present stage of butterfly and moth fauna of Saratov,
Ulyanovsk and Samara districts and adjoining territories
of the Volga region, such as the vast collected material
on which demanded the compilation and publishing was discussed
by us – three friends and colleagues – Vasily Anikin,
Sergey Sachkov and Vadim Zolotuhin, who became
the authors of the present edition. As result the conclusion
was drawn by us, that it is effective to use as a comparative
base well known writing work of E. Eversmann Fauna lepidopterologica
Volgo-Uralensis also taking into consideration
that its sesquicentennial jubilee has come.
Necessity of summarizing on this, as it looked to us, the
best investigated group was motivated by the number of circumstances:
on one side, the “popularity” of butterflies (as
members of our first part of the cycle), which from the collectors’
point of view takes an important sufficiently reasoned
role to complete the species list of Middle Volga region at
that moment, and on another side, the need in combination
of odd bits of information and their faunistic and taxonomic
revision. Moreover, all available significant works at
that time were devoted to the vast regions, with only a little
concerning mostly interest layer of the Volga region entomofauna,
which is frontier between Europe and Asia, or hopeless
depreciated both taxonomic and quantitative. Winged
by an idea of the creation sufficiently large work we have
started to undertake a task energetically, however we had
soon stumbled upon the serious nomenclatural and some
other problems as well as extreme inequality of the territorial
investigation. All this demanded the additional efforts
and investigations, searching of a little known and hard to
access literature, appealing to fundamental, mainly Russian,
collections and so on. In the course of expeditionary work
the additional material was collected also on other groups
of Lepidoptera, that let us to extend the range of interests
and, based on the fundamental writing of E. Eversmann, to
“hit” the entire order Lepidoptera and to extend geographically
the region additionally including into the area of interests
also Astrakhan and Volgograd Areas and also Bashkiria
and North-Western Kazakhstan in order to maximally
walk up to the geographical outlines of the region, which
was investigated by this outstanding naturalist of the 19th
century in the whole.
For widening of interest toward entire order of Lepidoptera,
the series of lepidopterological hand-books of European
part of the USSR published up to this time were also
favored, and these series initiated the natural increase of interest
to the regional faunistic investigations letting determination
of the collected material with high degree of reliability,
especially among so named Microlepidoptera identification,
that earlier created the formidable difficulties.
The structure of the work we decided to offer in the table
form not only with a view to economy of place, but also for
readers’ convenience for searching of needful information.
Order of taxa and nomenclatural decision are based on the
available up to that time and mostly accepted in the professional
sphere sources of literature and systems of different
groups having worked out by Russian and foreign specialists.
Into the information block we decided to include data
on the imago phenology, preferential biotopes and also larval
feeding preferences, among of them the special emphasis
was placed on the original data. The distribution in the
region is showed by marks in columns imaging the subjects
of administration division of territory for what the standard
marks of presence/absence and also marking of the type locality
and so on. This cycle has been published up till now
during almost 20 years also according to accumulation of data
on each group up to understanding by the authors of decisive
completeness of information, therefore the order of each
part published had no systematic dependence.