World Catalogue of Insects. Volume 5. Tortricidae (Lepidoptera)

John W. Brown [ed.], Apollo Books, Stenstrup, Denmark, 2005, 741 pp., hardcover, $174.50, ISBN 87-88757-41-2 This, the first volume in the Apollo World Catalogue series devoted to Microlepidoptera, also is the first attempt to catalog the world fauna of any major family of Microlepidoptera since the Oecophoridae (sens. lat.) by Gaede in 1938–1939 in the Lepidopterorum Catalogus. The last previous world catalog of Tortricidae was that of Meyrick in 1913, which treated only the Tortricinae of current concepts. In 1980 in Annual Review of Entomology (Powell 1980), I guessed there were >4,000 described species of Tortricidae, which was true but woefully conservative; by 1991 John Brown and I increased the estimate to >5,000 species; and Heppner the same year tallied 6,683! Several hundred new species have been described since then, but our naiveté may be prophetic of the state of world cataloging of Lepidoptera, one of the most popular orders among contemporary systematists—this catalogue lists just >9,000 species. With this total, the Tortricoidea, which includes the single family Tortricidae, ranks second only to Gelechioidea in species richness among microlepidopteran clades.