Hydaticus vittatus Fabricius 1775

There is no political boundary in animals' or plants' distribution. Comparative study on specimens collected from different neighboring states is essential to taxonomy. Museum collections are beyond political boundaries, providing hard-to-access material from world wide or a large geographic range to taxonomists and biodiversity biologists. This is an example of the Four-striped Diving Beetle, a species widely distributed in the Oriental and Australia Realms. The specimen was one of the 54 conspecifics collected by British naturalist G. Lewis from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1881-1882. They were first deposited in the British Museum of Natural History, later gifted to Japanese entomologist Michio Chujo, and finally obtained by the coleopterist Masataka Sato who made a donation of over 120,000 beetle specimens, including these 54 diving beetles, to NMNS before he passed away in 2006.