Catalogue of Reduviidae (Hemiptera) of India

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India is one of the 17 mega-biodiversity countries of the world and has a rich heritage of biological diversity including tiny microarthropods to charismatic megafauna. Zoogeographically, India belongs to the Oriental realm but the Ethiopian, Palaearctic species and some belonging to other realms are also found, because of the invasion of fauna and flora from other areas together with humans who has also contributed to this diversity. The geographical area of India is about 329 million hectares and its coast line stretches to nearly 7000 km (Jairajpuri, 1991). The climate ranges from temperate to arctic in the Himalaya to tropical and subtropical in its Indo-Gangetic plains and the peninsular region. The vegetative cover is rich and of a varied type, consisting of all kinds of forests and a vast expanse of grasslands having different types of habitats. The abundant of rainfall varies from about 100 mm in the deserts to as high as 5000 mm in Cherrapunji hills of Meghalaya. There are three well defined seasons viz. the summar, rainy and winter and two rather less defined ones, the autumn and spring. The ecology of major regions of India is however, largely dependent on rainfall and diverse forms of vegetation in its geographic location wherein Indo-Malayan, Indo-Chinese and Palaearctic fauna mingled provide a wide range of habitats including a number of ecologically distinct microhabitats.

The family Reduviidae belongs to the superfamily Reduviidea of the suborder Heteroptera of Order Hemiptera under Division Exopterygota of Class Insecta. The superfamily Reduviidea comprises of only two families viz. Pachynomidae and Reduviidae. Latreille (1807) was first to distinguish Reduviidae (Reduviidea) as a separate family. But Fabricius (1775) was the first to use the name Reduvius. Reduvids is the largest and most diverse group of predaceous terrestrial Hemiptera or true "bugs" (Froeschner and Kormilev, 1989; Maldonado, 1990; Cassis and Gross, 1995) and a few are blood suckers. They are polyphagous and consume wider array of preys, preferably soft bodied insect pests of agricultural importance and hence act as efficient biocontrol agents.

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