Folk knowledge of invertebrate species in Central Europe

In Central Europe there has been many ethnobiological research on the folk knowledge of plants, but much less on animals. Among them non-domesticated species and especially invertebrates are very underrepresented. In a global view research has mainly focused on tropic and boreal human communities. We carried out our research among Hungarians in three landscapes: Szilágyság in Romania, Drávaszög in Croatia and Gömör in Slovakia. Our main goal was to document the local ecological knowledge on all known invertebrate species. 57 knowledgeable persons were interviewed using colour photographs of about 200 invertebrate species which were classified by the informants to ca. 125/147/163 folk taxa. We found that the majority of the interviewed people still possessed surprisingly detailed and precise knowledge on the invertebrates living in their surroundings.