Checklist of British and Irish Hymenoptera - Chalcidoidea and Mymarommatoidea

Abstract Background A revised checklist of the British and Irish Chalcidoidea and Mymarommatoidea substantially updates the previous comprehensive checklist, dating from 1978. Country level data (i.e. occurrence in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man) is reported where known. New information A total of 1754 British and Irish Chalcidoidea species represents a 22% increase on the number of British species known in 1978.


Introduction
This paper continues the series of checklists of the Hymenoptera of Britain and Ireland, starting with Broad and Livermore (2014a), Broad and Livermore (2014b) and Liston et al. (2014). The Introduction to the series (Broad 2014) sets out the background and rationale. We aim to produce an up-to-date and accurate list of all Hymenoptera species recorded reliably from Britain and Ireland.
With more than 22,000 described species worldwide, Chalcidoidea is one of the largest and most diverse Hymenoptera superfamilies. Most species are under 3mm, and the group includes the smallest known winged insect, Kikiki huna Huber & Beardsley (a mymarid not found in the British Isles) measuring only 0.16 mm in body length (Huber and Noyes 2013). Chalcidoidea show an amazingly diverse range of biologies; the majority of taxa are parasitoids, attacking all stages of hosts in most insect orders as well as some arachnids, but phytophagous taxa and taxa with predatory larvae are also known. Information about Chalcidoidea classification and biology can be found in John Noyes's Universal Chalcidoidea Database (UCD), which contains original citations as well as references for all subsequent generic combinations and synonymies, and extensive lists of published host and distribution records. While the latter can be used to generate regional lists of Chalcidoidea, a British and Irish species list extracted from the UCD will not match the present checklist, from which published erroneous records have been removed and to which a large number of unpublished records based on reliably identified specimens in collections have been added.
Currently 22 (extant) Chalcidoidea families are recognized, 16 of which are represented in the British and Irish fauna. There have been some changes to the family-level classification recently (Heraty et al. 2013) and more may be anticipated. The only family-level change resulting from the Heraty et al. (2013) study that affects the British fauna is the elevation of the Azotidae to family status, from being a subfamily of the Aphelinidae. However, other major changes to the classification of Chalcidoidea since the 1978 checklist (Bouček and Graham 1978) include the removal of Mymarommatidae to its own superfamily (Gibson 1986;Noyes and Valentine 1989), the restriction of the Miscogastrinae of the Pteromalidae to just Graham's (1969) tribe Miscogasterini (Bouček 1988), the inclusion of the family Elasmidae as a tribe of Eulophinae (Gauthier et al. 2000), and the synonymy of the Pteromalidae subfamilies Cratominae and Panstenoninae under Pteromalinae (Heraty et al. 2013).
The British and Irish Chalcidoidea list, with 1754 species, is now 22% larger than in 1978 (see Table 1). This increase results mainly from additional records (including 42 unpublished records obtained from collection surveys -see Suppl. material 3) but also to a lesser extent from a net "gain" of taxa through taxonomic changes, as summarised in Table  2 Numbers of confirmed British and Irish Chalcidoidea species in the 1978 and current checklists (not including known introductions that have failed to establish in the wild or nomina dubia). The species numbers indicated in Broad (2014) have been updated to include new published records and records resulting from work done on the BMNH collections. Some of the diversity of British chalcids is illustrated in Figs 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28. Additional images of representatives of the British and Irish fauna can be found on the Flickr site of the BMNH Hymenoptera section, NHM Wasps.

Materials and methods
The bulk of the data behind this checklist is from the UCD, with further editing and research by the authors. Nomenclature follows the UCD, and distribution data are taken from the collections of the BMNH, the UCD and from various published sources, which are cited. Nomenclatural acts can be traced through the UCD; deviations from that source are cited. A more complete methodology can be found in . Although we include extensive synonymy, this is a checklist and not a catalogue. Names that have been used in relevant literature can be found here but we do not document all taxonomic acts as these can be traced in readily accessible catalogues, particularly the UCD.
The following conventions and abbreviations are used here: Future updates to the British and Irish Chalcioidea checklist will be incorporated in an online version of the checklist at Hymenoptera of the British Isles.

Distribution: Ireland
Notes: Omitted by Bouček and Graham (1978)as only recorded from Ireland (O'Connor et al. 2000), not Britain

Distribution: England
Notes: This name was overlooked by Graham (1987) and is therefore of uncertain generic placement; in the BMNH collections, inunctus has been included under Aprostocetus. English specimens were listed by Thompson (1955) but omitted by Bouček and Graham (1978 Only recorded as British in a catalogue of parasitoids and predators of insect pests (Thompson 1955 amsterdamensis (Girault, 1917, Decatoma) rimskykorsakovi (Erdös, 1952, Decatoma) Distribution: England, Wales