UNDER CONSTRUCTION, Please be Patient

WEST INDIAN BEETLE FAUNA PROJECT

The Coleoptera, or beetles, are the largest group of organisms on earth today. They represent about 1 in 4 animal species, and 1 in 5 of total organisms described to date. This is only the tip of the iceberg, and a vast number of species remain undiscovered and undescribed in all terrestrial habitats on our planet.

These pages are devoted to understanding the biodiversity of beetles in the West Indies. For our purposes, the West Indies are here defined in their biogeographic sense (Bond 1993) to include the islands that define the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and are off the continental shelf . These are oceanic islands in the sense that they are not attached to a continenet, and were not joined to one during a Pleistocene eustastic event. The West Indian biogeographic provence includes the Bahama Islands, the Turks & Caicos Islands, the Greater Antilles (Cuba to the Virgin Islands) and Lesser Antilles (Sombrero to Grenada), as well as a few islands in the mid-Caribbean (Cayman Islands, Aves Is., San Andrés, Providencia, Swan, etc.).

This excludes the Florida Keys, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dutch Leeward Islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, and those continental countries often included in the political West Indies, such as Belize, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. Bermuda is neither politically nor biogeographically West Indian.

This is a project of the Systematic Entomology Laboratory at Montana State University, in cooperation with Coleopterists World-Wide. Please check individual pages for specific cooperators.