Checklist of the Lepidoptera of the Big Thicket National Preserve

Bordelon, Charles; Knudson, Ed

This project, begun in 1990, as a Lepidoptera survey of the major units of the Big Thicket National Preserve, has gradually been expanded in scope to include data from many other localities; both encompassing and encompassed bythe unit of the Big Thicket National Preserve. This checklist attempts to include all Lepidoptera species known to occur in Hardin, Jefferson, Orange, Tyler, Polk, Liberty, Jasper, Newton, and Chambers counties of SE Texas; an area which includes the Big Thicket Biotic Region. In addition, data from the upper Texas coast is included for the sake of completeness, although the coastal salt marsh and dune habitats are technically not a part of the Big Thicket. Not included is data from Sabine, San Jacinto, Montgomery, and Harris counties, except for one locality in extreme SE Montgomery Co., (LHSP). Portions of all these counties were included in McLeod's 1971 survey of the Big Thicket Biotic Region. Int its present form; the checklist includes 1743 taxa in 65 families of Lepidoptera. Of these, 74 taxa are identified to genus alone (most of them undescribed species); the remainder are identified to species. Butterflies comprise 118 species of the total. There are about 30 species (mostly microlepidoptera), which are not included in the list because they are not in a recognized genus. If data from the coastal salt marsh and dune habitat were excluded, the checklist would still include about 1675 species. if data were added from Sabine, San Jacinto, Montgomery, and Harris counties, the checklist would easily top 2000 species. This figure represents about 40% of the total number of Lepidoptera species known from Texas and 18% of the total known from America north of Mexico. This is a remarkably large percentage for such a relatively small region and, serves as a good example of the tremendous bio-diversity of the Big Thicket region.