What is new and most interesting about the Nepticulidae of the Crimea and Lithuania

Due to the active destruction of landscapes as well as frequent fragmentation of habitats, global biodiversityis undergoing rapid decline. The increasing concern of the world’s scientific community about the biodiversitycrisis stimulated researchers to more actively inventorize the Earth’s main biomes (Stonis, 2010;Navickaitė et al., 2011b).The object of our research is one of the most primitive (and from this point of view, one of the mostinteresting) taxonomic groups of the Lepidoptera order (Nepticuloidea: Nepticulidae) comprising 850 speciesand 16 genera: Pectinivalva, Roscidotoga, Simplimorpha, Enteucha, Mononeura, Areticulata, Stigmella,Bohemannia, Ectoedemia, Fomoria, Acalyptris, Parafomoria, Trifurcula, Glaucolepis, Etainia and Varius(the classification of Nepticulidae follows Puplesis, 1994; Puplesis & Robinson, 2000, and Puplesis & Diškus,2003). The majority of these genera are widely distributed throughout many continents; they includethe world‘s smallest Microlepidoptera, which are characterized not only by their archaic morphology butalso, as plant-miners, are greatly specialized. One of the most prominent characteristics of Nepticulidae,their mining within the green tissue of plants, presents an issue which is interesting and important for ecology(Stonis, 2010; Diškus & Stonis, 2012).