The Fauna of New Zealand Series is an important resource – providing an authoritative synthesis of the state of knowledge of our unique New Zealand fauna. Each volume provides information on the taxonomy, nomenclature and descriptive data for the taxa covered. Many also include information on the biology, distribution, and habitat preferences of the taxa, as well as illustrations, identification keys and other notes.

The electronic versions are not intended to replace the printed New Zealand Fauna Series. The aim of the electronic versions is to increase awareness and improve access to this information by making them available via the Internet, and to add value by linking them with other online resources such the Ngā Aitanga Tuarā-kore a Tāne – New Zealand Terrestrial Invertebrates (http://nzbugs.landcareresearch.co.nz) and Ngā Tipu o Aotearoa – New Zealand Plants (http://nzflora.landcareresearch.co.nz).

In creating the electronic version we have attempted to accurately reproduce the content of the printed volume. While the content of this volume is wholly the responsibility of the authors of the volume, A. Larochelle and M.-C. Larivière, the layout and style of the content has been altered to accommodate the change from a printed text to electronic delivery via the Internet.

For scientific research, we strongly recommend that the printed version of this volume is used and cited.

We thank Manaaki Whenua Press for permission to create and make available on the Internet this electronic version of Fauna of New Zealand number 43.

We acknowledge the financial assistance of the Terrestrial and Freshwater Biodiversity Information System (TFBIS) Programme towards the preparation of this electronic version. The TFBIS Programme is funded by the New Zealand Government to help achieve the goals of the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy, and is administered by the Department of Conservation.

We acknowledge the many contributions during the creation of the electronic version by Ilse Breitwieser, Stephen Burgham, Greg Comfort, Jeremy Connell, Trevor Crosby, Karen Scott and Nick Spencer.

This file was created as part of a project to make nine volumes of the Flora and Fauna of New Zealand series available to the public via the Internet. The aim of the project was to improve access and awareness to the Series by making priority volumes available, in a searchable form, on the Internet. The volumes included in this project were Flora of New Zealand volumes 1 to 5 and Fauna of New Zealand numbers 11, 21, 40 and 43.

The project involved creating complete electronic versions of the printed text by converting existing electronic copies, rekeying the text or using optical character recognition; editing the text to ensure consistency with the printed text; converting the electronic version to XML; cross-linking the XML version (e.g., to enable navigation within the text); and presenting the XML on the internet. XML was used to capture as much of the structure of the volumes as possible, and to facilitate searching of the text.

This version represents the complete text of Fauna of New Zealand number 43.

Hyphenation has been removed from the electronic version only where hyphenation was used to span a word across two lines in the printed version.

The electronic version is divided into two major sections: a header section and the body of the text.

The header section describes the creation of the electronic file. The body of the text contains the entire text of the printed version. The body of the text is subdivided into a number of sections representing the major structure of the book (e.g., Table of contents, Preface, Acknowledgements, Taxon entries). Within each section the text was further subdivided according to a custom schema.

No additional material or interpretation was added to the body of the text. Editorial notes and additional information are restricted to the header section.

This electronic version of the text for Fauna of New Zealand number 43 was created from electronic copies of the volume in pdf format. The images for this volume were scanned from the printed version.