TACHINIDAE OF ORIENTAL REGION 281 



is unhappily suspect because of the extent of misidentification of the tachinids 

 involved. 



The unreliability of past identifications of the tachinid parasites makes it impos- 

 sible to compile host-parasite lists purely from the literature: mere cataloguing 

 from literature sources can be badly misleading. On this account it has been 

 necessary to omit many recorded hosts, not because such records are necessarily 

 wrong but because no specimens of reared Tachinidae have been seen to confirm 

 or refute the records. In particular should be mentioned a large number of recorded 

 hosts that are cited in the Indian Forest Records (especially the volumes for the 

 1930-1950 period) and that it has been impossible to accept for lack of confirmatory 

 evidence; tfiese, along with similar cases in other journals, are simply omitted, and 

 the absence of any published host-parasite record from the host catalogue here 

 presented is to be interpreted as meaning that I am unable to confirm the correctness 

 of the record. 



The host catalogue given here is based largely on material in the BMNH collection 

 and represents the first attempt since Thompson (1951) to coordinate the reliable 

 information on tachinid host-parasite relationships for the Oriental Region. It 

 is much more extensive than Thompson's catalogue for the Oriental area but does 

 not correlate records, as does Thompson's work, with literature references in the 

 Review of Applied Entomology, Series A. In compiling the parasite-host and host- 

 parasite lists the basic assumption has had to be made that the hosts cited on data 

 labels attached to reared tachinid specimens, or mentioned in dependable literature 

 references, were correctly identified (it is scarcely ever possible to confirm this 

 because museum collections have usually acquired their reared tachinids haphazardly 

 from field workers and lack correlated material of the hosts from which host identities 

 could be confirmed). For the tachinid parasites themselves the situation is different 

 and much more rigorous criteria can be applied: thus tachinids have only been 

 recorded as parasites of particular hosts when: (1) they have been personally identi- 

 fied, or (2) when the host record is from the original type-material of the tachinid 

 parasite, or (3) when published records, other than those in original descriptions, 

 are undoubtedly based on correctly identified Tachinidae even though specimens 

 have not been examined personally. 



Collections of agricultural and forest insects housed in various institutions in 

 south and south-east Asia (for example in the Forest Research Institute, Dehra 

 Dun or the Central Institute for Agricultural Research, Bogor) must undoubtedly 

 contain specimens of Tachinidae reared from known hosts, the associations often 

 representing host-parasite relationships that have not been known to me during the 

 preparation of the present host catalogue. Almost certainly reared Tachinidae 

 exist in such collections that will prove to correlate with many old host records 

 published in early or earlier literature. It is therefore obvious that the host cata- 

 logue given in the present paper is merely a preliminary attempt to categorize 

 the various host-relationships existing between Oriental tachinids and other insects, 

 so far as such relationships can be authenticated at the present time. Nonetheless, 

 incomplete though it is, the catalogue reveals several interesting and clearly signifi- 

 cant relationships between Oriental tachinids and their hosts that were far from 



