Cave fauna of Albania, North Macedonia and Turkey

Petar Beron was born in Sofia, 1940. He worked at the Institute of Zoology and in the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. He was Director of the Museum from 1992 to 2005. He retired in 2010 and became Professor Emeritus and Doctor of Biological Sciences in 2019. He is a co-founder of the Bulgarian Federation of Speleology and he was President of the Federation from 1985 to 2017, after that Honorary President. He has explored many caves and high mountains in over 90 countries, including Albania, North Macedonia, and Turkey. Author and co-author of many papers and books on the cave fauna, bats and their ectoparasites, zoology, zoogeography etc.

The book follows the pattern of the previous books in the East-West Publishing House series “Cave Fauna of the Balkans”. Outlined are the caves where cave fauna has been recorded in Albania (120 caves, 137 animal species), North Macedonia (55 caves, 152 animal species), and Turkey (ca. 150 caves, 426 animal species). The book also contains comparisons between the cave animals (mostly troglobites and stygobites) in the three countries and the dwellers of the caves of the neighbouring countries or regions. Maps of the distribution of the troglobites and the stygobites – in any one of the described countries – and bibliographies of the papers on these faunas (99 papers on Albanian, 94 on North Macedonian, and 320 on Turkish cave fauna) are also included.