Mayflies (Ephemeroptera) are found in lakes, ponds, streams and rivers, and provide an important food for fish, especially those in the salmonid family. The adults are copied by fly-fishermen and given a variety of common names such as the Angler's Curse, the March Brown and the Sherry Spinner. Although there are several regional guides to mayflies such as those produced by the Freshwater Biological Association (Elliott & Humpesch, 1983, 2010) and the excellent keys for Northern Europe (Engblom, 1996) and Central Europe (Bauernfeind & Humpesch, 2001), there has been no single text on European mayflies. This discrepancy has now been remedied by the publication of this impressive textbook, and the authors must be congratulated on their excellent work. Perhaps one reason for the lack of a previous publication was the large number of species to be considered. The present textbook lists 369 species in 19 families. In marked contrast, only 51 species in 10 families have been recorded in Britain and Ireland-one advantage of living on islands at the western limits of Europe! The geographical area covered by this new book is Europe west of the Ural mountains, including the Mediterranean islands, and the Maghreb region of North Africa. A short introductory chapter provides a general outline of the book and defines some terms. The authors correctly use the term 'larva' for all the aquatic stages except the last larval instar for which the term 'nymph' is also used. As they indicate, there is often some confusion between these two terms in the literature. This is followed by a much longer
The mayfly fauna of Turkey was reviewed including all hitherto known distribution records together with references and a few new records. Additionally, comments on taxonomy, identification and nomenclature are provided. Two species are new for the Turkish fauna: Ephemera
romantzovi Kluge, 1988 and Thraulus
thraker Jacob, 1988. A list of taxa including their recorded distribution in Turkey (according to provinces) is provided in the annotated catalogue. The type locality is also given for each species originally described from Turkey. According to the literature and the new records, 157 mayfly taxa representing 33 genera and 14 families were described from Turkey. Among them, 24 species are considered endemic to Anatolia.
Prosopistomatidae are a monotypic mayfly family, comprising at present about 25 nominal species, distributed throughout the Palaearctic, Oriental, Australian and Afrotropical Realms, but missing from the Nearctic and Neotropics. Larvae of Prosopistoma pennigerum (the species name ’pennigerum’ relating to the feather-like caudal filaments) had been discovered in 1762 by Étienne Louis Geoffroy in the neighbourhood of Paris and initially considered to represent a taxon related to Triops SCHRANK (Crustacea: Notostraca). Only in 1871, more than 100 years later, Émile Joly realized that the ‘binocle à queue en plumet’ was in fact a mayfly larva. Although recorded from various rivers throughout Europe in the past, nowadays most populations are considered lost or extinct. In 2006 the species was found in the Volga River, which represented the first record from the Russian Federation. On the basis of this material a detailed larval redescription of P. pennigerum is provided and discriminating characters and their variation are compared with previous descriptions and illustrations. The morphological description includes micrographs of relevant features, produced with special image processing software. Presumptive larval habitat requirements of P. pennigerum as observed at the R. Volga are summarized and discussed in comparison with earlier records.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.