What is Stygofauna Mundi?

In the spirit of 1986 Botosaneanu's seminal book "Stygofauna Mundi", our goal is to make distribution and evolutionary data on subterranean aquatic animal diversity* easily accessible to everyone**. Our team includes scientists from all over the world who have collaborate in gathering information published in over 20 different language and thereby making years of groundwater, meiofauna, and cave research readily accessible for answering timely research questions. 

This page is still under construction and Stygofauna Mundi is an ongoing project - So stay tuned for updates and new data.

We hope that Stygofauna Mundi will provide a framework for international collaboration, attracting more and more researchers into the dark side of animal biodiversity -  Together, we might finally get some of those answers we have been looking for and, hopefully, frame new, even more interesting, questions.


Acknowledgements
This project started in the frame of the 2017-2019 Marie Curie project "ANCAVE - Anchialine caves as model of Evolution (745530)" to Alejandro Martínez, hosted by Diego Fontaneto in the Water Research Institute (CNR, Verbania). See "MEG-Verbania" to learn more about the team. The complete team, including the information on all our collaborators as well as the running project that are using our database will be soon included under "The Team".



(*) If upon this words you got stuck on the definitions of those terms, check out our section "on Jargon" in the menu "Other things" above.
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(**) You might not be able to access any data yet, because we are working on it — but the database will be fully available and free when it gets ready.
The cave that you fear entering holds the secret that you seek
​— Joseph Campbell