Wednesday, February 25, 2015

A Standoff Between Millipedes

I came across a New York Times article with quite a bit of relevance to what we're interested in.  The article summarizes a study by millipede specialist Robert Mesibov describing the boundary in northwest Tasmania between two congeneric species of millipede: Tasmaniosoma compitale and Tasmaniosoma hickmanorum.  According to his study, the boundary is not geographical as is common and expected.  Normally a species divide would be a river, a hill or ocean, etc. This boundary goes across hills and rivers and took 100 days of field work over the course of two years to map out.



Pictured above, this 140 mile long boundary separates the two millipede species that look very much alike.  Nevertheless, they stay separated.  Pretty fascinating stuff.  I don't have much experience with biogeography, but this seems highly relevant and would love to hear hypotheses as to why this might be happening.  I suppose this is a case of biology and is considerably lacking in the geography portion.  The study called the boundary "environmentally incongruent".

Brittany Hallawell

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/science/a-standoff-between-two-species-of-millipedes-on-tasmania.html?_r=0
http://zookeys.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=2248
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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 27, 2015 at 4:14 PM

    Hi Brittany! Great post about millipedes—they are pretty funny creatures. How peculiar that they stay so separate on the island from other species of millipedes! I wonder what the adaptation for that is...

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  2. tasmaniasafariMarch 1, 2015 at 4:59 PM

    Awesome post, Brittany! I wonder what it is about the millipedes that creates this divide, it sounds pretty fascinating. Also, do you know if the border is absolute, or if there are some rebel millipedes that wander back and forth? I think it would be hard to determine that, but it's still really cool.

    Carlos Aguilar

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  3. tasmaniasafariMarch 2, 2015 at 3:09 PM

    This is so cool! I wonder what the boundary is? Temperature maybe, or some other non-geographic environmental factor ? Maybe there's just that fierce competition for the millipede niche? - Aaron

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  4. AnonymousMarch 9, 2015 at 5:46 PM

    I wonder if it has something to do with territory climate or if the millipedes are actually keeping each other out?

    ReplyDelete

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