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This volume represents the sixth
and seventh parts of the series I have undertaken as a Scientific Associate of
the Natural History Museum, with access to collections, libraries and with
working space and facilities provided in the Department of Entomology. I am
grateful also for continued use of a microscope on loan from the International
Institute of Entomology (IIE; now part of CABI Bioscience). The work,
particularly that on the higher classification, has been providing a taxonomic
context for ongoing ecological projects in Papua New Guinea (see p. 37), and
has had a contribution of technical support time therefrom through the
Smithsonian Institution.
I have
enjoyed the support of a part-time research assistant, Shayleen James,
generously funded by The Friends of the Natural History Museum. Support from
her predecessor, Maia Vaswani, has also continued intermittently in NHM
alongside that of Shayleen through the generosity of Henry Barlow. He is
currently funding Maia, now in France,
to prepare a database for a general index and bibliography for the series. Both
Maia and Shayleen have undertaken a considerable amount of literature research,
dissection, text keyboarding, checking and help with preparation of the
figures; Shayleen provided the artwork for Figs 1 and 2, and produced and
assembled digital images of the genitalia using a Nikon Super Coolscan
44000EDTM and Adobe Photoshop 7.0TM. Much support in seeing the series through
to publication in Malaysia
continues to be provided by Henry Barlow, and this volume is published in
conjunction with the Malaysian Nature Society. The colour plate images were
prepared by Phil Hurst and Harry Taylor of the NHM Photographic Unit. I am very
grateful to my wife, Phillipa, for keyboarding, the production of camera-ready
copy for text and figure legends, and for helping edit the images for the
genitalia figures. Mr Hok Kim Loong provided the images of larvae for Plate 28.
The
work would have been impossible without the full access, mentioned above, to
the collections and other facilities in The Natural History Museum, London. Material was also
examined in, or from, the United States National Museum, Washington, Nationaal
Natuurhistorisch Museum, Leiden, the University Museum, Oxford, the Museum fur
Naturkunde, Berlin, the Museo Civico di Zoologia, Rome, the H.S. Barlow
collection, the Forest Research Centre collection, Sepilok and the FRIM
collection, Kepong. I am grateful to the staff of all the above institutions
for their assistance. The host records mentioned in previous parts are now
almost entirely recorded by Robinson
et al. (2001), but some additional
data are noted in the text, particularly those accumulated by Vojtech Novotný,
Scott Miller and an energetic team of parataxonomists in Papua New Guinea
(see above).
Thanks
are also due to Henry Barlow, Ted Edwards, Michael Fibiger, Tony Galsworthy,
Harish Gaonkar, Martin Honey, Hiroshi Inoue, Ian Kitching, Lutz Kobes, Vladimir
Kononenko, Martin Lödl, Geoff Martin, Wolfgang Nässig, John Rawlins, Gaden
Robinson, Gabor and Laszlo Ronkay, Wolfgang Speidel, Shin-Ichi Yoshimatsu and
Alberto Zilli for advice, information, discussions and comments on parts or all
of the text. As indicated on p. 36, a few of the genera covered here are being
investigated more fully in collaboration with Alberto Zilli and, for some of
them, Willem Hogenes.
In
naming new species in the genera Diomea and Chorsia, I have
continued to pay tribute to those teachers (alas, many now deceased) at Bryanston
School who were my mentors during my
time there, having originally named one (Holloway, 1976) after G.D. Harthan,
one of my tutors and biology teachers.
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