CURCULIONIDAE (COLEOPTERA: CURCULIONOIDEA) FROM LORESTAN PROVINCE, WESTERN IRAN

Curculionidae (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea) is the largest family in the animal kingdom, including about 48,000 species in total. They are small to very large (1-60 mm) with diverse habits, shapes and colors. Both adults and larvae feed on plants and the female bores into seeds and stems where the eggs are laid. This group of beetles includes a wide range of pests of crops and stored products (Anderson, 1995; Marvaldi et al. 2002; Oberprieler et al., 2007).


INTRODUCTION
Curculionidae (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea) is the largest family in the animal kingdom, including about 48,000 species in total.They are small to very large (1-60 mm) with diverse habits, shapes and colors.Both adults and larvae feed on plants and the female bores into seeds and stems where the eggs are laid.This group of beetles includes a wide range of pests of crops and stored products (Anderson, 1995;Marvaldi et al. 2002;Oberprieler et al., 2007).
Lorestan province, with an area of 28,392 km², comprises a historic territory of western Iran amidst the Zagros Mountains.The terrain consists chiefly of mountains, with numerous ranges, part of the Zagros chain, running northwest to southeast.The highest point of the province is a peak at 4,050 m; the low-lying areas in the southern-most sector of the province are approximately 500 m above sea level.The climate is generally sub-humid continental with winter precipitation, a lot of which falls as snow.Temperatures vary widely with the seasons and be-tween day and night (12 to 32 C in summer and -2 to 8°C in winter).
The fauna of Iranian Curculionidae have been comparatively well studied (Modarres Awal, 1997;Broumand, 1998;Sakenin et al., 2009;Ghahari et al., 2009Ghahari et al., , 2010)), and all the published data on Iranian curculionid beetles were catalogued by Legalov et al. (2010).The aim of this paper is a faunal study of the family Curculionidae in Lorestan province.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Materials were collected by sweeping net, beating tray, aspirator and other methods (Lodos et al., 1978(Lodos et al., , 2003) ) from different regions of Lorestan province.The sampled regions in this research included: Pole-Dokhtar, Sarab-Doreh, Khorram-Abad, Borujerd, Azna, Aligoodarz, Alashtar, Chaghalvandi, Dorood, Noor-Abad, Roudbar, Sefid-Dasht, Darreh-Asbar, Kouhestak.In addition to these, the preserved materials in various museums in Iran or other countries, and in the personal collections of some researchers have also been included in this study.The information concerning the species' name, describer, locality, altitude (in brackets), date of collection, place/plant on which the species were collected, and the number of specimens (in brackets) are given.Although the names of the plants on which the specimens were collected are recorded, this doesn't necessarily mean that they are the hosts of the species.In this paper, the classifications and nomenclature of curculionids suggested by Zherichin and Egorov (1991), Alonso-Zarazaga and Lyal (1999), Colonnelli (2003) and Velazquez de Castro et al. ( 2007) have been followed.The recorded insect genera have been listed in phylogenetic order and the species are sorted in alphabetical order.

RESULTS
In total, 56 weevil species from 19 genera and 5 subfamilies were collected from different regions of Lorestan province, western Iran.The list of species is given below.

DISCUSSION
The results of this faunal study indicate that the species diversity of Curculionidae is very diverse in Lorestan province.This province has diverse flora in fields, forests and pastures as the host plants of curculionids.In this research, among the different genera, Tychius Germar with 13 collected species is the most diverse.On the other hand, only 19 genera of 5 subfamilies were studied in this work, and we therefore suggest to researchers to continue and complete the faunistic surveys of the family Curculionidae in the mentioned province, especially in the localities not sampled in this research.These local faunistic surveys represent valuable systematic data to the science, and will result in new distributional data.