Field naturalists have searched across Clare Island for animal groups ranging from the microscopic to birds and mammals. Many more species have been found since the original survey a hundred years ago, due to the availability of modern methods, which greatly add to our knowledge of the biodiversity of Clare Island. The lists of species featured here include some new to the island, some new to Ireland and some new to science. This volume signals the need for further field work and taxonomic research to track biodiversity changes arising from human activity.
Land and freshwater fauna is the tenth volume in the New Survey of Clare Island series, which seeks to build on the pioneering work of the first Clare Island Survey (190911), the most ambitious natural history project ever undertaken in Ireland and the first major biological survey of a specific area carried out in the world.
John Breen obtained his BSc in zoology followed by a PhD in social insect ecology at University College Cork (National University of Ireland). He spent a year studying bumblebees and ants at the Zoological Museum, University of Bergen, Norway, followed by a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, before taking up a position at the University of Limerick. He is a retired Associate Professor. His main research interests are in the ecology of Irish social insects and, more recently, beekeeping.
T.K. (Kieran) McCarthy (1949-2019) graduated from University College Cork, with a first-class honours degree in zoology in 1971 and a PhD on the Irish freshwater Hirudinea (leeches) in 1974. Following post-doctoral research in Oxford, Finland, and Dublin, he was appointed to the Zoology Department, N.U.I., Galway. Throughout his career, and after retirement in 2011, he continued his research on a variety of aspects of freshwater ecology (limnology, entomology, fish parasitology and biogeography) and especially on European eels. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of odz, Poland, and University of Tokyo, Japan. Éamonn Lenihan is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Natural Sciences at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). He obtained his PhD in Zoology in 2020 from NUIG. His research focuses on the ecology and conservation of the critically endangered European eel (Anguilla anguilla) in hydropower impacted rivers, but he is also interested in the migration dynamics of other diadromous fish species.
