A Census of the Obligate Subterranean Fauna of the Balkan Peninsula

Abstract

With the exception of an isolated reference to a cave fish in China in 1540 (Chen et al., 1994), the first phase of zoological discovery in caves really began in the 18^th and early 19^th century with the amphibian Proteus anguinus (mentioned by Valvasor, 1689, but described scientifically by Laurenti, 1768) and the beetle Leptodirus hochenwartii (Schmidt, 1832). These discoveries, and a great number of others, were made in the Slovenian region of Kras (= Carso, or Karst), the region which gave its name to the geomorphological phenomenon of karst. Kras is located in the northwestern Dinarides, or Dinaric Alps. This was followed by the earliest discoveries of cave animals in other parts of the world (in the Caucasus, the Appalachians, the Pyrenees, and New Zealand), in the middle of the 19^th century. Thanks to this history (Belles, 1992; Sket, 1996), the “classical Karst” won its appellation as the “cradle of speleobiology” (biospeleology). The Slovenian karst is a part of the wider Dinaric karst region, which in turn is the main karstic region of the western Balkans. By chance, the earliest finds of interstitial aquatic animals, which represent another type of subterranean fauna, were also made in this part of the world. These latter discoveries were made during the research of S. Karaman in the 1930s in Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, FYROM), on sites located mainly along the river Vardar. It became evident later that these early phases of discovery had both taken place in a region which is particularly rich in cave and interstitial aquatic fauna.