Some poorly known and rarely reported terrestrial arthropods (Insecta, Coleoptera, Carabidae) in Morocco

Abstract

The Carabidae play an increasing role in biodiversity conservation and ecological monitoring, making a faunistic update all the more necessary. Carabids, however, are poorly known considering their diversity in the world. Also known as ground beetles, they are the fourth most diverse group within the Coleoptera, but the amount of published data sets from Morocco is disproportionately small; many species and regions have yet to be well researched. In an effort to fill this gap, we studied the faunistic composition of the carabidae in the north-west of Morocco between spring 2019 and summer 2020 at three different habitat types using two types of traps. Here we present new data on some rare and poorly known Carabidae in Morocco: Pterostichus (Sterocorus) globosus ssp. globosus (Fabricius, 1792), Poecilus (Parapedius) decipiens ssp. decipiens (Waltl, 1835), Harpalus neglectus alluaudi (Antoine, 1922), Graniger cordicollis (Audinet Serville, 1821), Brachinus (Brachinus) efflans (Dejean, 1830), Brachinus (Brachinidius) angustatus (Dejean, 1831), Carabus (Macrothorax) rugosus ssp. rugosus (Fabricius, 1792) and Siagona dejeani (Rambur, 1838). Our results contribute to the knowledge of the Moroccan carabid fauna by introducing eight new localities of terrestrial insects that were poorly unknown and infrequently reported in Morocco over the past 20 years. Dataset published through Zenodo (Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7665486)