Pyraloidea (Lepidoptera) of a Mediterranean Elevational Gradient in Mersin Province, Türkiye: An Annotated Checklist with 77 New Provincial Records

The Pyraloidea are among the largest superfamilies of Lepidoptera, yet their distribution in the eastern Mediterranean is documented unevenly. Light-trapping was carried out on 54 nights between 2008 and 2024 at 45 localities in the districts of Erdemli and Mezitli, Mersin Province, southern Türkiye, along an elevational gradient from 150 to 1800 m a.s.l. The survey yielded 492 occurrence records of 1330 specimens belonging to 161 species in 91 genera, 129 of them identified with confidence and 32 provisionally; the Pyralidae are represented by 78 species and the Crambidae by 83, and the largest subfamilies are the Phycitinae (61 species), the Crambinae (23) and the Spilomelinae (22). Seventy-seven species are reported for the first time from Mersin Province, as assessed against the national catalogue, the nineteenth-century records of Staudinger, two annotated lists for the district of Anamur, an unpublished doctoral thesis on the region and the applied entomological literature; seven further species recorded from the province by Staudinger were not found. Checking the nomenclature species by species against the Global Information System on Pyraloidea altered 28 entries relative to the source material, including five changes in generic placement and one synonymy. Sample-based rarefaction and the Chao2 estimator indicate that only about three-quarters of the pyraloid fauna likely to be present has been recorded, and the distributional patterns are therefore regarded as provisional. Species composition tended to become more dissimilar with increasing elevational distance between sampling events (Spearman ρ = 0.187, p < 0.001), independently of season, and most of the dissimilarity (94%) was attributable to species replacement rather than to nestedness; no significant relationship between elevation and species richness per night was found. Neither district contains a protected area. The occurrence data are published in Darwin Core format.