Together with 30 years of Symposia on Chrysomelidae! Memories and personal reflections on what we know more about leaf beetles

Certainly, Carabidae, Curculionidae and Chrysomelidae are the beetle families that are most studied and the most inspiring for scientific papers. Those three families are also among the most numerous and present the most colorful beetles. Publications go from simple articles in the past to sophisticated papers using cladistics, molecular biology and statistics, in pure research or, for leaf-beetles or weevils, in agriculture. Thousands of papers are published each year on Chrysomelidae. Probably the actual described number of Chrysomelidae, estimated last century as 35.000 species, reaches 45.000 and there probably exist 55.000 to 60.000 species around the world. Canopy species are among the least known, true also for minute species living in litter or mosses Coleoptera can easily exceed 1 to 2 million species and, in the past (in the Mesozoic, but mostly in Cenozoic), they must have been much more numerous. Only Curculionidae and perhaps Staphylinidae can surpass the number of Leaf-Beetles. Curculionidae are present everywhere, even in the sub-Antarctic islands and in Greenland, where Chrysomelidae are missing, even if present there during the Pliocene. Still many ZooKeys 547: 35–61 (2015) doi: 10.3897/zookeys.547.7181 http://zookeys.pensoft.net