Some Early Records by J. D. Alfken of Insects from Hawaii and Laysan

While investigating the generic position of some crickets found in Hawaiian lava tube caves by Francis G. Howarth and his associates, I discovered that they represent the genus described from Molokai by Alfken (1901) as Paranemobius for the single new species, schauinslandi, which was preoccupied by Paranemobius Saussure, 1877, a very different genus occurring in India and Ceylon. The preoccupied Hawaiian genus was later named Caconemobius by Kirby, 1906, but it has been largely overlooked by later authors except for Chopard (1967). A detailed report on Caconemobius will be published elsewhere, but meanwhile it may be useful to invite attention to a 1904 paper by Alfken in which 68 insect species from Hawaii and 17 species from Laysan were recorded, in addition to others from New Zealand and nearby islands. These insects represent more than 10 orders. Johann Diedrich Alfken (1862-1945), primarily a student of bee sys-tematics, was located during most of his career at Bremen, Germany