Corresponding author: Kirill V Makarov (
Academic editor: Stephen Venn
We compiled a list of the ground beetles that have been confirmed to occur to date in the southern Kuril Islands, Russian Far East. The list includes 168 species, all of which are known from Kunashir Island and the species richness on the remaining islands ranges from 68 (Shikotan Island) to 21 species (Tanfil'eva Island). The species richness is shown to depend sublinearly on island area, this being unusual for island faunas (
A large part of data is published here for the first time on the records of ground beetles in the southern Kuril Islands with precise localities. This allows not only the taxonomic composition of the faunas, but also the composition of local faunas to be discussed.
Starting with the paper by
Later, the data on the ground beetles of Kunashir were replenished even more. For example, the research of G. Sh. Lafer (
The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) repository, aside from the general list of animal species of Kunashir (
The body of information accumulated so far makes it possible to discuss both the differences in the faunas of the individual islands studied and the heterogeneity of the species composition within Kunashir as the largest island.
Yuri Sundukov, Kirill Makarov
The studies were conducted on the southern islands of the Kuril Archipelago within the boundaries of the Yuzhno-Kurilsky administrative district of the Sakhalin Oblast. The district includes the Kunashir Island of the Greater Kuril Chain and all islands of the Lesser Kuril Chain (Fig.
The climate of the southern Kuril Islands is moderate humid maritime, with a strong influence of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. The Islands are characterised by a harsh wind regime (with gusts up to 35-50 m/s), high rates of precipitation (1200–1500 mm per year), relatively mild winters and cool summers (average temperature of the coldest month is -5.6°C and of the warmest month, +15.5°C). Waters of the warm Soya current approach the Okhotsk coast of the Archipelago and the cold Kuril-Kamchatka (Oyashio) current approaches the Archipelago from the Pacific side.
Kunashir is the southernmost and one of the largest islands of the Great Kuril Chain. The terrain of the Island is mainly volcanic and it consists of three mountain ranges formed by four active volcanoes: in the northern part, the isolated Tyatya Volcano (1819 m a.s.l.) and the Ruruy Volcano (1485 m a.s.l.) as the highest place of the Dokuchaeva Mountain Ridge; in the central part, the Mendeleev Volcano (886 m a.s.l.); and the Golovnin Volcano (541 m a.s.l.) in the southern part. The mountain ranges are separated by isthmuses: Yuzhnokurilskiy and Sernovodskiy, which are composed of marine sediments and volcanic folded Neogene rocks. Kunashir, along with Iturup, has the greatest landscape diversity amongst the islands of the Kuril Archipelago. The dense river network is formed by numerous mountain and lowland rivers and streams, many of which have high temperatures and mineralisation content. Amongst the two dozen lakes on the Island, the largest freshwater lake in the Kuril Islands is Lake Peschanoe, while the largest thermal lake is caldera Lake Goryachee.
The vegetation of Kunashir is noticeably richer and more diverse than on the other islands of the Archipelago (Figs
Shikotan is the northernmost and largest island of the Lesser Kuril Chain. Its terrain is formed by steep hills and low-mountain massifs, the highest places being the Shikotan (412 m a.s.l.), Ploskaya (363 m a.s.l.), Notori (357 ml a.s.l.) and Tomari (356 m a.s.l.) mountains. The hydrographic network is quite dense and consists of small freshwater mountain rivers and streams. There are neither lakes nor thermal springs. A distinctive feature of the Island is the absence of altitudinal zonation, the vegetation thus being represented by a mosaic of dwarf bamboo meadows (Fig.
Polonskogo Island is located 25 km south of Shikotan. The coastline is weakly indented by small bays. The surface of the Island is low and flat, at no point exceeding 16 m a.s.l. The shores are occupied by sand and pebble beaches or eroded peat bogs approaching the water. There are no rivers, but only short streams with narrow depressed channels and swampy banks and two rather large freshwater lakes. The Island is completely devoid of forest vegetation. Its elevated shore banks are covered with dense herb meadows and wild rose thickets (Fig.
Yurii Island is located in the south of the Lesser Kuril Chain. The coastline is heavily indented, with deep bays over the entire extent of the western coast. The shores are mostly rocky. The terrain is formed by four undulating land massifs connected by low isthmuses. The height of the watersheds ranges from 20 to 30 m a.s.l., the highest elevation being 44 m a.s.l. The isthmuses are occupied by low-level swamps and small lagoon lakes. There are sand beaches in the larger bays, while the remaining shore is occupied by pebble or large-block beaches. There are only small streams with narrow channels depressed into the clay soil and swampy banks. There is no forest vegetation, the upland areas being covered with dense herb meadows (Fig.
Tanfil'eva Island is the southernmost island of the Lesser Kuril Chain, located 5 km off the north-eastern coast of Hokkaido. The landscape is flat, with the greatest elevations reaching up to 16 m a.s.l. The coastline is strongly indented, forming wide bays and headlands that protrude far into the sea. Short streams and several lagoon lakes, the largest of which are located near the east coast, represent the hydrographic network of the Island. The relief and vegetation are similar to those on Polonskogo Island (Fig.
The present study was based on the material we collected on Kunashir, Shikotan, Polonskogo, Yurii and Tanfil’eva Islands in 1990, 2008, 2009 and 2011–2018, as well as the collections of the Federal Scientific Center of East Asia Terrestrial Biodiversity, the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, Vladivostok, the Moscow Pedagogical State University, Moscow and the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg.
Most ground beetles were collected by hand; to a lesser extent by beating vegetation, sifting the litter and using window flight and soil traps.The places of capture of ground beetles are shown in the Fig.
Kunashir Island and the neighbouring islands of the Lesser Kuril Chain. To clarify the distribution of certain taxa, the table includes data on the records from the Sakhalin, Iturup and Urup Islands and mainland Russian Far East.
43.341 and 44.559 Latitude; 145.377 and 147.09 Longitude.
Rank | Scientific Name | Common Name |
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family |
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Ground beetles (EN), Жужелицы (RU) |
Altogether, 168 carabid species are known to occur in the southern Kuril Islands, on the basis of both literature data and museum collections. We exclude four species (Table
Thus, the richness of the ground beetle fauna of the southern Kuril Islands totals 168 species. All these species are known from Kunashir Island [there are records of five species of ground beetles from Shikotan Island which have not been found on Kunashir to date (
The number of species depending on island area (Fig.
The obtained parameters of the classical power dependence
As we demonstrated earlier, the beetles of the Kunashir Island form at least two local faunas, "northern" and "southern", the border between both roughly corresponding to the Yuzhnokurilskiy isthmus (
The features of the "northern" local fauna are determined by the endemic
The fauna of the "southern" block is more heterogeneous. On the one hand, the endemic subspecies
The dataset (
1990, 2008, 2009, and 2011–2018 years
DUBC — Daugavpils University Beetles collection (Ilgas, Latvia); FEB - Federal Scientific Center of the East Asia Terrestrial Biodiversity FEB RAS (Vladivostok, Russia); MPU - Moscow State Pedagogical University (Moscow, Russia); SIEE - Institute of Ecology and Evolution. A.N. Severtsov RAS (Moscow, Russia); VNIIKR — All-Russian Plant Quarantine Center, (Bykovo, Moscow Region, Russia); ZIN - Zoological Institute RAS, (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Dried
Creative Commons Public Domain Waiver (CC-Zero)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 License.
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Column label | Column description |
---|---|
OccurenceID | Simple identifier - prefix "CSK" and ascending number |
scientificName | The full scientific name, including author and year |
kingdom | |
phylum | |
class | |
order | |
family | Full scientific name of the family in which the taxon is classified ( |
genus | Generic name |
specificEpithet | The name of the first or species epithet of the scientificName |
infraspecificEpithet | The name of the last or species epithet of the scientificName |
taxonRank | The taxonomic rank of the most specific name in the scientificName (species or subspecies) |
organismQuantity | A number value for the quantity of specimens |
organismQuantityType | The type of quantification system used for the quantity of organism |
verbatimLocality | The original textual description of the place |
verbatimCoordinates | The verbatim original spatial coordinates |
verbatimEventDate | The verbatim original representation of the date information |
recordedBy | A person,responsible for recording the original Occurrence |
basisOfRecord | Preserved Specimen (in all tables) |
continent | Asia (in all records) |
country | Russia (in most records) |
countryCode | Country code |
stateProvince | Sakhalinskaya Oblast', in most records |
islandGroup | The name of the island group in which the Location occurs |
island | The name of the island on or near which the Location occurs |
locality | The specific description of the place |
habitat | Category or characteristic of the habitat in which the beetles are collected |
eventDate | The date or interval during which an Event occurred |
year | The four-digit year |
month | The integer month |
day | The integer day |
verbatimCoordinateSystem | In all tables: degrees, minutes, seconds |
geodeticDatum | Geodetic datum, WGS84 in all records |
decimalLatitude | The geographic latitude |
decimalLongitude | The geographic longitude |
coordinateUncertaintyInMetres | The horizontal distance (in metres) from the given decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude describing the smallest circle containing the whole of the Location |
institutionCode | The acronym in use by the institution having custody of the object(s) or information referred to in the record (DUBC, FEB, MPU, SIEE, VNIIKR, ZIN) |
We are grateful to everyone who helped us with the collection of material, the staff of the State Nature Reserve "Kurilskiy", Yuzhno-Kurilsk and the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint Petersburg. We are also grateful to A. Lisenkova for the translation of the text and to the reviewers who provided valuable critiques.
Yu. Sundukov - collection and identification of ground beetles, analysis of literature, data preparation; K. Makarov - collecting and identifying of ground beetles, preparing data uploading to GBIF, editing.
Study area of the Kuril Islands.
Typical habitats of
subalpine vegetation
dwarf cedar forest
Erman's birch forest
dark coniferous forest
mixed coniferous-broadleaved forests
broadleaved forests
Typical habitats of
alder-birch forest
coastal willow
grass-sedge meadow
tall grass
dwarf bamboo meadow
sedge-moss swamp
Typical habitats of
dark coniferous-birch forest
dwarf bamboo meadow
alder forest
elevated dwarf shrub bog
coastal willow
swamp grass-sedge meadow
Typical habitats of
Polonskogo Island, herb meadow and wild rose thickets
Polonskogo Island: reed bog
Yurii Island, dense herb meadow
Yurii Island, sedge-moss bog
Tanfil'ev Island, dense herb meadow
Tanfil'ev Island, sedge-moss bog
Ground beetle collecting localities
The species richness of the ground beetle fauna of the southern Kuril Islands depending on island area (red line - the power function
Species of ground beetles from Kunashir Island not included in the present study.
|
|
|
|
vicinity of Yuzhno-Kurilsk, 2.VIII.1995 | Yu. Marusik | FEB RAS | |
env. Dubovoe, 11.IX.1976 | V. Kuznetsov | FEB RAS | |
Peshchanoe Lake, west coast, 17-18.VIII.1980 | S. Storozhenko | FEB RAS | |
vicinity of Yuzhno-Kurilsk, 2.VIII.1995 | Yu. Marusik | FEB RAS |
Island areas and the number of ground beetle species in the southern Kuril Islands.
Island | Species number | Area, km2 |
Kunashir Isl. | 168 | 1510.20 |
Shikotan Isl. | 68 | 252.77 |
Zelyony Isl. | 2 | 58.38 |
Tanfil’ev Isl. | 21 | 12.42 |
Polonsky Isl. | 27 | 11.78 |
Yuriy Isl. | 23 | 9.98 |
Anuchina Isl. | 1 | 1.96 |