Living Book · Pre-order · 2026 Edition

Adephaga: Hunters of Land and Water

Ground beetles, tiger beetles, diving beetles, and their allies — morphology, ecology, and global distribution  ·  by Vladimír Štrunc

The first family-level treatment of the entire suborder Adephaga in one book — all 12 families and 45 subfamilies of the Caraboidea, from the predatory dominance of Carabidae on land to the streamlined hunters of fresh water in Dytiscidae, Gyrinidae, and seven smaller aquatic families. Built on the modern phylogenomic framework of Beutel & Leschen (2016), Lorenz (2017), and Cai et al. (2022), with a unified 223-character data matrix.

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A single suborder, two worlds

Adephaga is the second largest of the four beetle suborders — not by sheer number of species, but by ecological reach. Its name (from the Greek for “voracious”) is accurate: nearly every adephagan, larva and adult, is a predator. Cicindela hudsoni, scaled to its body length, is the fastest land animal alive. Dytiscus marginalis, the great diving beetle, drags fish twice its size to the bottom of European ponds. Gyrinus whirligigs split their compound eyes into two halves, one for air and one for water, simultaneously scanning both worlds.

Distributed across every continent including Antarctica (a single carabid, Trechisibus antarcticus, breaks the line), Adephaga occupy nearly every freshwater habitat — from glacial pools to ephemeral desert puddles, from cave streams to tropical rain pools — and every terrestrial habitat hosting prey, including the world’s driest deserts, the arctic tundra, and the foggy salt-pans of the Mediterranean. The terrestrial side is dominated by the world’s largest beetle family, Carabidae; the aquatic side by the predaceous diving beetles, Dytiscidae.

Why this volume — and why now

The last comprehensive single-volume treatment of Adephaga at family and subfamily level was Beutel & Leschen’s Handbook of Zoology — Coleoptera, Volume 1 (2nd edition, 2016) — a magnificent reference, but ten years old and accessible primarily as institutional library acquisition. Since then:

• Lorenz’s CarabCat — Systematic Catalogue of the Carabidae of the World (2017) established the modern reference framework for the largest adephagan family, now with online updates.
• Miller & Bergsten’s Diving Beetles of the World (2016) re-anchored Dytiscidae systematics at subfamily and tribal level.
• The integrated phylogenomics + fossil resolution of Coleoptera by Cai et al. (2022) in Royal Society Open Science refined the position of Adephaga as sister to all other beetles except Archostemata and Myxophaga.
• Bouchard et al. (2011, 2017, 2024) provided the modern nomenclatural authority for all beetle family-group names, including Adephaga.
• The family Cicindelidae was formally elevated from a Carabidae subfamily to a full family (Duran & Gough 2020), realigning the entire Caraboidea hierarchy.

This is the first single-volume reference to integrate all of that — at family and subfamily level across the entire suborder, with a unified 223-character data matrix, verifiable citations to primary literature, and a 99.4 % matrix fill rate.

What each of the 12 family and 45 subfamily accounts contains

A Living Book — built to stay current

Adephagan systematics are alive. New genera and subfamilies are described every year; molecular phylogenies redraw subfamily boundaries inside Carabidae and Dytiscidae; entirely new families are still being added (Meruidae was described in 2005, Aspidytidae in 2002). A static book is incomplete the year it ships.

Adephaga: Hunters of Land and Water is part of the Living Books series — a new generation of digital reference works that continue to grow after publication.

Updates are pushed automatically to your FlipHTML5 access; a regenerated PDF is sent by email at each minor release (typically twice per year).

Twelve families, two ecological worlds

From the dominant ground-running Carabidae to the deep-water diving Dytiscidae, the 12 families of Adephaga split cleanly into terrestrial hunters and aquatic predators — with several family-level surprises in between.

Who this volume is for

Quality assurance — how this volume was built

This is not a compilation. The underlying data matrix — covering all 711 beetle families with the Adephaga subset isolated for this volume — has been through 40 documented revision cycles (R40 v2.2), with 633 logged audit entries and a 99.4 % matrix fill rate, with explicit auditing against:

• Beutel & Leschen (2016) — Handbook of Zoology — Coleoptera, Volume 1 (2nd edition), the primary morphological and systematic reference across Archostemata, Myxophaga, and Adephaga.
• Lorenz (2017) — CarabCat: Systematic Catalogue of the Carabidae of the World, the primary taxonomic authority for the dominant adephagan family.
• Miller & Bergsten (2016) — Diving Beetles of the World, the modern reference for Dytiscidae and adjacent aquatic families.
• Bouchard et al. (2011, 2017, 2024) — family-group names of Coleoptera and complete type genus catalogue. Nomenclatural authority across all 12 Adephaga families.
• Cai et al. (2022) — Integrated phylogenomics and fossil data illuminate the evolution of beetles. Royal Society Open Science. The modern phylogenomic framework for Coleoptera as a whole.
• Duran & Gough (2020) — family-level elevation of Cicindelidae, realigning the Caraboidea hierarchy.
• Lawrence & Šlipiński (2013) — Australian Beetles, Volume 1, the comparative reference for diagnostic morphology across all Australian Adephaga families.
• Anton & Beutel (2006) — head morphology of Adephaga, foundational for character coding throughout the matrix.

Every taxonomic claim is tagged with its source reference. Where literature conflicts — and across 12 families and 45 subfamilies, it does — the conflict is explicitly resolved in a documented audit log (633 entries to date), not silently averaged.

About the author — Vladimír Štrunc

Vladimír Štrunc is an entomological book publisher based in the Czech Republic. The Insect Books portfolio bridges the class Insecta at every taxonomic scale — from the full-class overview of The Insect Orders down through suborder volumes like this one, individual families (Cicindelidae, Cerambycidae), and subfamilies (Prioninae). Adephaga: Hunters of Land and Water is the first single-volume treatment to bring together the terrestrial and aquatic sides of Caraboidea, drawing on primary taxonomic literature from Linnaeus (1758) to the most recent papers of 2025.

The Insect Books portfolio so far has covered tiger beetles, ground beetles of Africa, longhorn beetles of the Western Palaearctic, prionids of the world, and jewel beetles — alongside the class-level Insect Orders. Adephaga: Hunters of Land and Water fills the missing suborder-level link, providing a comparative framework where tiger beetles, ground beetles, diving beetles, and their less familiar relatives finally appear side by side.

Adephaga: Hunters of Land and Water is part of Štrunc’s Living Books publishing series — continuously updated scientific references.

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The first single-volume treatment of the entire suborder Adephaga — all 12 families, 45 subfamilies, ~45,000 species across two ecological worlds, with a unified 223-character data matrix and 448 primary references for every claim.

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Part of the Living Books series by Vladimír Štrunc · insect-books.com