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 at the top 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 work down from Order to species using the top-of-page menus, or you can start from species names in the Catalogue and work your way up to Order. 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
 
In late 2007 I added a mapping page to this website. To use it your browser needs to have a Flash player and Javascript enabled. The species distribution maps generated by the software include unpublished data and may not be entirely correct. For some species the localities are accurately known, but the identifications are unconfirmed.

What do we know about Australian millipede diversity?
 
Surprisingly little (Black 1997). There are some 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 Australian history were those of the New Zealand specialist Peter Johns, who visited Australia briefly several times in the 1970s and 1980s and collected at scattered locations. 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 is now an informal Australian Millipede Group with about a dozen local members. Several AMG investigators are working on millipede biology, and others are doing taxonomy. We are still a very long way from a satisfactory overview of our fauna, but 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.

Bob Mesibov
Penguin, Tasmania
November 2006
revised November 2007
taxonomic information updated regularly