Guide to the Butterflies of the Palearctic Region: Satyrinae (Part VI): Tribe Satyrini, genus Karanasa - Bozano G.C., Churkin S., Ecweiler W.

Omnes Artes, Milano, August 2021, 106 pp. in full color, 21 x 29 cm, soft cover, ISBN: 978-88-87989-25-0,excellent condition

This Karanasa book has been a long lasting project, the longest of my series. It was started in May 2018! Since the beginning I new that Karanasa systematics would have been a difficult subject: little material available, extreme individual, ecological and geographical variability, scarce literature, a part from Avinoff & Sweadner’s revision. Fortunately, along the way, additional authors have joined the project, building a wide international team owning an extraordinary amount of knowledge and experience on the subject of Karanasa. While preparing this book we took benefit of the availability of a lot of old and new material, from many museums, notably the Avinoff’s collection at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (Pittsburgh, US) and the Wyatt’s collection at the State Museum of Natural History (Karlsruhe, Germany), and from the private collections of the authors and of many colleagues that have generously helped us.

I would like to point out that the systematic arrangement derived from our work, is a best guess based on external and internal morphology, on zoogeography and on our interpretation of such a variegate inter- and intra-specific variability. For sure this book is not the ultimate answer to the systematic arrangement of genus Karanasa. But I hope that it will be a good starting point for further studies, having cleared many misleading issues. It is peculiar that, in the current bar-coding era, almost no molecular analysis has been performed and so little is known about the phylogenetic systematics of Karanasa species and also about their biology.

The authors would like to express their thanks to all the colleagues which have helped making available rare specimens and generously sharing with us their experiences on the subject of Karanasa: L. Arcelli (Milano, Italy), R. Androw, A. Seago and E. Weir (Carnegie Museum Natural History, Pittsburgh, US), E. Balletto (Torino, Italy), J.-F. Charmeux (Paris, France), A. Floriani (Milano, Italy), E. Gallo (Genova, Italy), D. Goshko (Moscow, Russia), V. Gurko (Chemovtzy, Ukraine), A. Hausmann (Zoologische Staatssammlung, Munich, Germany), H. Huang (Qingdao, China), B. Huertas and G. Martin (Natural History Museum London, United Kingdom), P. Janak (Frydek-Mistek, Czech Republic), S.-Y. Lang (Shuangliu, China), M. Lodl (Museum of Natural History, Vienna, Austria), W. Mey (Museum of Natural History of the Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany), I. Pljutsch (Kiew, Ukraine), K. Rose (Mainz, Germany), V. Sbordoni (Roma, Italy), H. Sugiyama (Gifu, Japan), R. Trusch (State Museum of Natural History, Karlsruhe, Germany), J.-C. Weiss (Metz, France).