Hydrophiloidea
superfamily of beetles
Hydrophiloidea, known as water scavenger beetles, is a superfamily of beetles. Until recently it included only a single family, the Hydrophilidae (water scavenger beetles), but several of the subfamilies have been removed and raised to family rank. Hydrophiliidae remains by far the largest member of the group, with nearly 3,000 described species. The other families have no more than 400 species. The Histeroidea are closely related and sometimes considered part of a sensu lato Hydrophiloidea. The majority of the clade is aquatic, which is thought to be the ancestral ecology of the group, with some lineages like Sphaeridiinae becoming secondarily terrestrial. Modern representatives of the group first appeared during the Late Jurassic.
Families include:
Epimetopidae
Georissidae
Helophoridae
Hydrochidae
Hydrophilidae
Spercheidae
Extinct genera
†Laetopsia Fikácek et al.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hydrophiloidea” is superfamily of beetles. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hydrophiloidea, superfamily and beetles, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q132264. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hydrophiloidea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.