Scatopsidae Newman, 1834

The Scatopsidae are a medium-sized but still inadequately known family of derived nematocerous Diptera. Adults are minute to small midges ranging from 0.5 to 4.0 mm in length, generally dark in colour, sometimes more or less marked with yellow. Body rather strongly built, often quite elongated, with parallel-sided abdomen. Eyes holoptic, forming a characteristic supraantennal bridge. Antenna comparatively short, composed of two basal segments and a flagellum of 5-10 flagellomeres that are generally wider than long. Wing venation reduced, generally only anterior veins pigmented. Larvae flattened, with a complete cephalic capsule, peripneustic. All known larvae are saprophagous, living in a wide variety of media (rotten plants and fruits, rotten wood, under decaying bark of dead trees, soil, leaf litter, fungi, dung, etc) (Haenni & Vaillant 1994). The adults may be found in nearly all kinds of biotopes, but more frequently in open, fresh and marshy areas.

The world fauna of Scatopsidae comprises some 350 species (Haenni 1997), of which 102 species in 22 genera are known in Europe (Haenni 2007 and recent additions). 52 species are included in the present checklist: 46 from the Czech Republic (41 from Bohemia and 42 from Moravia) and 43 from Slovakia. Since the preceding PCV2 (Martinovský 1997b), which was mainly based upon the important papers by Martinovský (1997a) for the Czech Republic and by Kozánek and Roller (1997) for Slovakia, the number of species had increased by eight in the Czech Republic (ten in Bohemia and seven in Moravia) while it had remained the same in Slovakia. The rather numerous additional records may be found in a set of recent faunistic papers (Haenni & Barták 2000, 2006, Haenni et al. 2005, Martinovský 1998). On the other hand, two nomenclatorial changes have been proposed by Haenni (1998, 2002). By contrast only one new record for Slovakia has been added (Haenni 2009) since the previous electronic version (ECV1, Haenni 2006). The species richness of the scatopsid fauna is rather well known in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia, but the number of species will continue to grow as there are several new species awaiting description.

The male and female genital characters enable safe identifications to be made. A key to the Palaearctic genera (both larvae and adults) may be found in Haenni (1997), where references to papers for identification to species level are also included. The classification used here follows Amorim (1994) and Chandler (1998), while the nomenclature follows Haenni (2007).