Abstract
The Iranian fauna of Megastigmidae consists of 12 species (5.3% of the world species), none of which are endemic to Iran, which are classified in two genera, Bootanomyia Girault (five species) and Megastigmus Dalman (seven species). The species were collected from 16 provinces (Table 4), among which East Azarbaijan (four species) has the highest diversity, followed by Kermanshah, Lorestan and West Azarbaijan provinces (each with three species), Fars, Kerman, Kordestan, Qazvin, Tehran (each with two species), and Golestan, Hamadan, Isfahan, Khuzestan, Razavi Khorasan, Semnan, and Zanjan (each with one species).
However, the exact distribution of Bootanomyia almusiensis (Doğanlar) in Iran is unknown. The hosts of five species recorded from Iran are known, all of which belong to Cynipidae (Hymenoptera).
Comparison of the megastigmid fauna of Iran with adjacent countries (Table 5) indicates the faunas of Turkey (20 species) and Russia (17 species) are both more diverse than Iran (12 species), followed by Kazakhstan (six species), Armenia (five species), Turkmenistan (three species), and Afghanistan, Azerbaijan and Iraq (each with one species); no species have been recorded from the other five neighboring countries (Noyes, 2019). Furthermore, 17 species were recorded from the former USSR (Noyes, 2019).
Turkey shares eight known species with Iran, followed by Russia (seven species), Armenia (four species), Turkmenistan (three species), and Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq (each with one species shared).