Order Ephemeroptera

Abstract

Mayflies comprise a small order of insects, with approximately 3500 species, 450 genera, and 42 families (numbersupdated based on Sartori & Brittain, 2015). The Neotropical realm, even with a relatively few families (16) is themost diverse in terms of genera and species (130 and 820, respectively). These numbers, however, increased exponentially in the last 10 years (Domınguez et al., 2014; Cardoso et al., 2015), and many species and probably somegenera remain to be described. Cardoso et al. (2015), for example, predicted more than 11,000 species to occur in Brazil alone, although their predictive model is possiblybiased by the recent increase in species descriptions. On the other hand, da-Silva & Salles (2012) estimated 600 undescribed species for the same country, while Sartori &Brittain (2015) estimate 1,000 undescribed speciesworld wide.