Brief Introduction on Chinese Mayfly Research History (Insecta: Ephemeroptera)

ZHOU Chang-Fa

Mayflies, and with other aquatic insects, have been a subject of interest in China in very ancient time. Early literary records of mayflies can be found in The Book of Songs (about B.C. 625) in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. From then on, a lot of writer and poets have mentioned this "one-day living creatures" in their books and poems. LI Shizhen (Li Shichen, 1596) also described mayflies in his famous book on medical Ben Cao Gang Mu (Pen Ts'ao Kang Mu). The first but false figure of a mayfly can be found in the annotated book Er Ya by Guo Pu (276-324 A.D.), the vivid figures were found in the book printed in 1726 and 1784. In the scientific sense, the first description and figure of mayflies were found in the newspaper: Ge Wu Hui Bian (Revision on Science) in 1894.

Modern aquatic insect research by Chinese scientists began in the late 1920's under the influence of Dr. James G. Needham of Cornell University. Dr. Xu Yinqi ("Hsu Yinchi"), a Ph.D student of Dr. Needham and the founder of Chinese Ephemeroptera research, published his first paper, "Two new species of Mayflies from China" in 1931 and devotedly engaged in research on Ephemeroptera taxonomy and morphology from 1932-1938. The Biology of Mayflies (Needham, Traver, and Hsu 1935) is still universally acknowledged as a classic work. "The mayflies of China" was a series of papers (1935-1938) that provided a comprehensive survey and summary of all previously known Ephemeroptera in China and added a new genus and 15 new species, bringing the known Chinese fauna to 79 species in 21 genera of 3 families (10 subfamilies). Since then, mayfly research was mostly interrupted until the early 1960's.

Under the direction of Dr. Xu, a research group (including You Dasou, Gui Hong et al.) in Nanjing Normal College began to study this kind of insects. Their first report on mayflies appeared in 1978.

Kang and Yang (1994-1996) described 46 new species larvae from Taiwan, China. So at the present time, there are 249 known mayfly species of China.