Millipedes of Australia

Introduction

About Millipedes of Australia
How to use this website
Distribution maps
What do we know about Australian millipede diversity?
Acknowledgements

About Millipedes of Australia
 
This website contains a checklist of the described species of millipedes native to Australia. It is a resource for taxonomists, not an identification guide. It does not contain identification keys or pictures.
 
Millipedes of Australia is an updated, expanded and annotated version in simple HTML of a checklist I prepared in Platypus software for the Australian Biological Resources Study in 2002. The ABRS version can still be found online but is not regularly updated.

How to use this website
 
Each page has a navigation menu in the left-hand sidebar to help you find your way around. There are also many hyperlinks to move you from one page to another within the site, and other links which take you to useful references off-site. The text size is based on your browser's default. To make the text larger or smaller, use the text size controls in your browser.
 
Millipedes of Australia is organised hierarchically. You can either start from species names in the Catalogue and work your way up to Order, or work down from Order to species using the sidebar menus. The core pages are the species pages. These have species-name synonymies and details of types.
 
There are likely to be some errors and omissions. If you see something that needs changing, please email me about it. I would be especially grateful for notice from taxonomists of new publications relevant to the Australian millipede fauna.
 
The synonymy style used here is a little unusual. Under each genus and species name I have tried to include all the works that I recommend users should read. Users should not, of course, copy any synonymy entry into a new publication before seeing the original work cited in the entry. Copying will only repeat any unintended errors I have made, and will result in a longer synonymy than many taxonomists (and many journal editors) will find acceptable.

Distribution maps
 
This website has an interactive maps page for species distributions. To use the page your browser needs to have a Flash player and Javascript enabled. The species distribution maps generated by the software include unpublished data and some may not be 100% correct. For some species the localities are accurately known, but a few of the identifications are unconfirmed.

What do we know about Australian millipede diversity?
 
Surprisingly little (Black 1997). There are more than 350 native species in this checklist, but there are hundreds more in museum collections, and previously uncollected species can readily be found almost anywhere in Australia. It is not yet possible to produce an identification guide to the common native millipedes of any Australian state or region, let alone all the millipedes.
 
The Australian millipede fauna is poorly known because until recently there were no local specialists or enthusiastic collectors. Taxonomists in other countries have worked with the small number of millipede specimens collected during European zoological expeditions to Australia. They have also examined a few of the millipedes collected by Australian naturalists, and by Australian specialists interested in other faunal groups.
 
To the best of my knowledge, the first millipede surveys in Australia were those of the visiting New Zealand specialist Peter Johns in the 1970s and 1980s. Johns was followed by the Dutch specialist Dr C.A.W. Jeekel and his wife, who methodically collected millipedes from Queensland to Tasmania in the Spring of 1980. The first single-authored taxonomic work on native millipedes by an Australian only appeared in 2002!
 
There are currently (late 2008) four Australian researchers working on millipede taxonomy. Although we are still a very long way from a satisfactory overview of our fauna, a start has been made, and hopefully the Millipedes of Australia checklist will grow steadily in coming years.

Acknowledgements
 
I am very grateful to Keith Houston for his help and encouragement in compiling the 2002 ABRS checklist. For that checklist and for this one, I thank the colleagues who assisted with obtaining and checking literature, especially Geoff Baker, Greg Edgecombe, C.A.W. Jeekel, Zoltan Korsos, Hans Reip and Monique Nguyen Duy-Jacquemin. The interactive mapper was built using WorldKit software (http://worldkit.org). Many thanks to developer Mikel Maron for advice!

Bob Mesibov
Penguin, Tasmania
November 2006
revised December 2008
Note: taxonomic information and locality data are updated regularly