Crambidae, Latreille, 1810

Kravchenko, Vasiliy D., Poltavsky, Alexander, Segerer, Andreas, Speidel, Wolfgang & Müller, Günter C., 2020, An annotated checklist of the Crambidae (Lepidoptera: Pyraloidea) of Israel, with remarks on their distribution and phenology, Israel Journal of Entomology (Oxford, England) 50 (1), pp. 85-129 : 86

The family Crambidae

The grass moths were included in the Pyralidae as a subfamily until Munroe and Solis (1999) raised them to a full family of the Pyraloidea . Most of the Crambidae species are nocturnal, or at least crepuscular, therefore light trapping remains a main method of collecting these moths. Crambid caterpillars are typically stem borers of the Poaceae ; they also develop in plants of a broad range of other families. Thus, some Crambidae species have achieved pest status of many important crops.

The grass moths are distributed throughout the world and represented by almost 2000 known species (Slamka 2008).About 490 species have been recorded in Europe ( Slamka 2006, 2008, 2013; Leraut 2012), 310 of them are known from the Balkans ( Plant & JakŠiĆ 2018). The Crambidae fauna of Turkey is probably very rich, but the data are scattered across a number of publications together with other families in the superfamily Pyraloidea . Only in vicinity of the Van Lake Basin (East Turkey), 304 species of Pyraloidea were collected ( Kemal & KoÇak 2018). According to Roohigohar et al. (2016), 64 species of the Crambidae have been recorded for Iran; however, many more species are expected to occur in this country.