Pitfall traps intercept the activity of carabids, and the activity mirrors the way by which the species disperse and eventually cluster toghether, so that it is possible to describe the species groupings characterizing different habitats on the basis of their activity pattern. This was acknowledged in the traditional literature on carabid synecology (see the review in ), and by several authors working on carabid assemblages with an "abundance approach", as e.g. [28, 53–57].