On studying Heteroptera fauna from the northern slope of the Khamar-Daban Ridge (Eastern Siberia)

The aim of this work was to evaluate the significance of the Khamar-Daban as a refugium for Heteroptera. The Khamar-Daban Ridge is stretched along the southern coast of Lake Baikal, in the center of Northern Eurasia. The northern slope of the Khamar-Daban Ridge has unique for Eastern Siberia climatic conditions which allow assuming the refugial value of the Khamar-Daban for the survival of some relict and scarce insects. We collected insects mainly in the central part of the northern slope of the Khamar-Daban Ridge from Murino village in the west and Manturicha village in the east in 2013-2014. Some data were collected close to the eastern edge of the Ridge, in the floodplain of the Selenga River. Here, in the vicinity of Mostovka, Ilinka and Talovka villages, occur small patches of Japanese elm (Ulmus davidiana var. japonica (Rehder) Nakai), a broadleaf tree species. The Japanese elm is a relict species for Eastern Siberia. The main area of the species is limited in Russia by the lower reaches of the Amur River in the Far East. We investigated different biomes, i.e. coniferous and deciduous forests, mesophyte and meso-xerophyte grasslands. For collecting insect, we used standard entomological methods. Identification of collected data was performed in Irkutsk and then, new findings were verified in the entomological collection of Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg). Furthermore, we studied entomological collections of the Baikal Natural Reserve (Tankhoi) and Irkutsk State University (Irkutsk). We collected 113 species of Heteroptera from 14 families. Taking into account the published data, the total list of species for the Khamar-Daban Ridge counts 149 species from 18 families. Most of Heteroptera in the Khamar-Daban are widely distributed in the Paleactic and are common species for Siberia. The lists of species from elm forests and from central part of the Khamar-Daban Ridge are significantly different. In elm groves were collected some species, which prefer drier or moderately humid habitats (Nabis punctatus mimoferus Hsiao, Deraeocoris ventralis ventralis Reuter, Stictopleurus sericeus (Horvath, 1896), Carpocoris purpureipennis (De Geer, 1773), Sciocoris distinctus (Fieber, 1851). Among collected Heteroptera species, 11 species from 4 families are registered in Republic of Buryatia for the first time, i.e. Lygocoris contaminates (Fallen, 1807), Phytocoris nowickyi Fieber, 1870, Stenotus binotatus (Fabricius, 1794), Orthocephalus saltator (Hahn, 1835), Orthotylus salicis Jakovlev, 1893, Megalocoleus molliculus (Fallen, 1807), Plagiognatus collaris (Matsumura, 1911), Tingis ampliata (Herrich-Schaeffer, 1838), Berytinus minor (Herrich-Schaeffer, 1835), Graphosoma lineatum (Linnaeus, 1758). We did not find typical nemoral species in the Khamar-Daban Ridge, but there are some species on the list (i.e. Phytocoris nowickyi, Orthocephalus saltator, Plagiognatus collaris, Naphiellus irroratus), which are more typical of the temperate zone of the Far East or for the western part of the Palearctic. These species should be subjects for further biogeographic research. Acknowledgments: The author is grateful to Associate Professor FA Konstantinov (Saint Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg) for help in identification of insects.

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