S. Mahunka szerk.: Folia Entomologica Hungarica 58. (Budapest, 1997)

FAUNISTIC ANALYSIS The great majority of the sawflies are ecotone animals, in other words, inhabiting transitional areas between two adjacent ecological communities. Thus, closed forests can show up only a few injurious species strongly attached to some conifer species. The same applies to monocultures or monotonous plant communities (e.g., Athalia or Dolerus species). Consequently, the spread of sawflies may be expected in river-valleys, along road-sides, forest-cuttings. The formation of the fauna of the Carpathian Basin has been much influenced by the broad Volhiny-Podolian hilly region and east from that vast East-European Plain spreading as far as the Ural Mts. This means mostly a plain effect. From the south only Mediterranean, so called, colouring elements crept up. While from the north, the European species invaded this basin, like Megalodontes klugi (Leach, 1817), Calameuta pallipes (Klug, 1803), Dolerus niger (Linné, 1767), Heterarthrus aceris (Kaltenbach, 1856), Harpiphorus lepidus (Klug, 1814) finding suitable biotopes for proliferation. At the same time, in the huge Ukrainian plains as in the Caipathian Basin such boreal Palaearctic elements occur, like Xyelajulii (Brébisson, 1818), Arge clavicornis (Fabricius, 1781), Siobla Sturmi (Klug, 1814), Tenthredo fagi (Panzer, 1798), 77. livida Linné, 1758. The best part of the species well adapted themselves to the extreme weather conditions and to the versatile vegetational cover, since where the host-plant occurs the sawflies species attached to it regularly come forward, e.g., Arge ochropus (Gmelin, 1790), A. enodis (Linné, 1767), A. pagana (Panzer, 1798), Selandria serva (Fabricius, 1793), Dolerus germanicus (Fabricius, 1775). The populations of the Holarctic Sirex juvencus (Linné, 1758), S. noctilio Fabricius, 1793, Emphytus cinetus (Linné, 1758), Femisa dohrnii (Tischbein, 1846) and F. pusilla (Lepeletier, 1823) have much shrunk in the territory of the Volhiny-Podolian table-land. On the other hand, these species are rather well represented in hilly and mountainous regions within the Caipathian Basin. Interestingly the pest of rape and of other Cruciferae, Athalia rosae (Linné, 1758) or the currant sawflies, Pristiphora pallipes (Fallén. 1808), sometimes entirely denuding the foliage of currant and gooseberry are quite common within and without the Caipathian Basin. The latter species is especially a good example, since it is found in mountainous regions just as well as on plains surrounding the high mountains of the Carpathians. The gene centre and main distribution area of the specifically thermophilous and xerophilous Elinor a species are in North Africa. The species number of this genus is drastically decreasing proceeding north. In England, for example, only a single species: Elinora dominiquei (Konow, 1894) is found. In the Carpathian Basin, however, three species have been ascertained: Elinora flaveola (Gmelin, 1790), E. frivaldszkyi (Mocsáry, 1879) and E. sabariensis (Mocsáry, 1880). Peculiarly enough for about a century the latter species, described from the western parts of Hungary, right at the foot of the Alps, has been considered to be an endemism of the Carpathian Basin, however, recently, it was also found as a xerophilous species on the warm forest steppe strip of the Ukraine. The mining sawfly, Messa glaucopis (Konow, 1907) is well spread in a broad band across the middle of Europe reaching eastwards as far as the river Dnieper. So far, it has not been captured in the Carpathian Basin, though, its host-plants, the various poplar species are common far and wide in Hungary. The following sylvicolous species are also found in this broad forested belt: Acantholyda flaviceps (Retzius, 1783), Trichiosoma lucorum (Linné, 1758), Blasticotoma filiceti Klug, 1834, Metallus gei (Brischke, 1883),