Family COLOBATHRISTIDAE Stål, 1865
I. M. Kerzhner
The family includes 23 genera and 83 species. About a half of them is distributed in the Neotropical Region and the other half in the Oriental and Australian Regions. No species of the family are known from Africa and the Indian subcontinent. In the territory covered by the present catalogue, Colobathristidae are found only in South China and Taiwan. Relationships of the family were discussed by Štys (1966), Kumar (1968) and Henry (1997b).
All species whose habits are known feed exclusively on grasses. Phaenacantha saccharicida (Karsch) was reported as injurious to sugar cane in Indonesia and Phaenacantha bicolor (Distant) as "excessively common in sugar-field".
World revision: Horváth, 1904c (outdated). Palaearctic catalogue: Kerzhner, 2001e. Review of Chinese species: Hsiao, 1977c.