Biodiversity of Heteroptera

This chapter presents an overview of the seven infraorders and the 91 currently recognized families of Heteroptera. For each family, it provides a brief diagnosis, selected information on their habits and economic importance, references to the key literature, and known numbers of species. The chapter also discusses the importance of understanding heteropteran biodiversity from a phylogenetic and economic viewpoint, including their role in conservation biology and global warming. It then gives examples of the many true-bug attributes, including information on their morphology, distribution, numbers, host associations, and economic importance. Recent treatments of various families, such as the Coreidae, Lygaeoidea, Miridae, Pentatomidae, and other families presented in Schaefer and Panizzi (2000), have provided much-needed synthesis of widely scattered information that is important to better understand certain pest groups. Heteroptera's roles as plant feeders, hemolymph-sucking parasites, invertebrate predators, or water-quality indicators make them unquestionably important organisms in the environment.

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