Marine Biology Research Division

Hermatobates is a genus of rarely collected and little known marine insects.  The first species, H. haddoni Carpenter was described in 1892. Several additional species were described subsequently (Coutière and Martin, 1901a, 1901b; China, 1956, 1957; Herring, 1965) and they were all assigned to the Gerridae although Matsuda (1960), in his review of the World Gerridae, excluded Hermatobates from that family.  The status of this genus is thus still debatable; it will be discussed elsewhere (Andersen, Cheng & Polhemus, in preparation).  A review of the relevant literature, with a list of the known species, their distributions and their biology, was published by Cheng (1976).