The Preliminary Study On The Fauna And Geographic Distribution Of The Tenebrionidae In Xinjiang

The family Tenebrionidae is one of the largest families of insects.Under the extremely bad condition of Xinjiang , a special desert ecological system is formed by the internal power of organism with desert flora and insect fauna.This research is carried out under the support of my tutor's national nature funds. The purpose of this research is to find out the general picture of the fauna and geographic distribution of the Tenebrionidae in Xinjiang. We organized and identified the specimens which collected in the insects specimens laboratory of life science and technology department of Xinjiang university, from almost everywhere of Xinjiang with combination of the conventional methods and the electroscopic scanning technique.The research gets the results as following: 1) According to the author's investigation on the spot for three years and other people's research data, totally 266 species belongs to 23 tribes and 72 genera of darkling beetles are described, of which there are 35 new record species in China and 3 new species;2) The fauna composition's analysis indicates that the fauna composition of Tenebrionidae with 266 species is very simple, just only 6 components, of which 32.7 percent (87 species) belong to Mid-Asian ingredientï¼› The next are 81 Centro-Asian species,30.5 percent of the total Tenebrionidae in Xinjiang; 65 Endemic species,24.4 percent of the total number; 12 Palaearctic species,4.5 percent of that; 2 Euro-Mid-Asian species,0.75 percent of that; 7 Euro-Siberian species,2.6 percent of that. There are also 12 Widespread species,4.5 percent of the total number;The origin of the Tenebrionidae in Xinjiang was also discussed according to the fauna components' characteristics.3) The study of the geological distribution of the Tenebrionidae in Xinjiang indicates that: Junggar basin desert has abundant darkling beetles. There are 161 species, accounting for 60.5 percent of 266 species analyzed and its fauna composition is also complicated.Tarim basin desert basin is nearly all-closed. So the species communication with the nearly area is very hard. Meanwhile, the Taklimakan desert in the middle of the Tarim basin is extremely arid region. Therefore the species of darkling beetles are lower than that of Junggar basin, only 92 species, accounting for 34.6 percent.The darkling beetles of Dongjiang basins are 63 species accounting for 23.7 percent of total analyzed species, in which there are more Centro-Asian, respectively 31 species accounting for 42.9 percent. Tianshan Mountain has most various kinds of the darkling beetles (54 species) amounting to 20.3 percent of the total number; The next is Altay Mountain containing 28 species, 10.5 percent; the last is Karakorum Mountain just having 13 species, 4.9 percent.