Spirostreptidea, Brandt, 1833

Shelley, Rowland M. & Golovatch, Sergei I., 2011, Atlas of Myriapod Biogeography. I. Indigenous Ordinal and Supra-Ordinal Distributions in the Diplopoda: Perspectives on Taxon Origins and Ages, and a Hypothesis on the Origin and Early Evolution of the Class, Insecta Mundi 2011 (158), pp. 1-134 : 37-39

Suborder Spirostreptidea ( Fig. 34 )

The nominate suborder occurs in the North and South Temperate Zones and the Tropics. It is absent from Europe and Australia / New Zealand, and occupies seven areas – two in the New World, three in Africa, one in the Middle East, and one in south/southeastern Asia; three are large and four are restricted. Jeekel’s ordinal map (1985) and the earlier ones of Kraus (1966) of Harpagophoridae and Spirostreptidae correspond to Spirostreptidea for our purposes; additional maps exist in Crawford (1979) and Kraus (1978).

In the New World, the suborder and nominate family reach their northern limits in the southwestern and southcentral US (Arizona, New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, and Oklahoma), as depicted by Causey (1975); the western limit is the Colorado River in the US and the eastern side of the Gulf of California, in Mexico, as Orthoporus ornatus (Girard, 1853) occurs on Tiburon Island, Sonora. In an inset map, Causey (1975) depicted occurrences in southern California and throughout Baja California, so it flagrantly contradicts the adjacent, larger map, which is accurate to our knowledge. RMS has not seen an authentic spirostreptid from either of these reasonably well sampled areas, and as large, abundant, and active as these millipeds are, it is reasonable to conclude that one would have been collected by now if they occurred there. We also have not seen US samples from outside the area in Causey’s large map; the northernmost locality on the Texas Coast is in Victoria Co. ( Causey 1964a). We cite O. ornatus from Sonora, Coahuila, and Chihuahua, Mexico (Appendix) to supplement records of Causey (1964a, 1975); localities for the first two states are particularly important because she cited and mapped only one record from each.

Published records do not exist from every country and Mexican state to the south. We report (Appendix) Campeche, Mexico, and Belize / El Salvador, but continuous spirostreptidean occurrence can be reasonably assumed throughout central and southern “mainland” Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, and all of Central America as shown by Jeekel (1985). Spirostreptidea are absent from the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, peninsular Florida, and the Keys. In the Antilles, they have been reported (as Orthoporus spp. ) from Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Culebra, Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, Dominica, Barbados, St. Vincent, Carriacou, Grenada, Tobago, and Trinidad ( Pocock 1888; Chamberlin 1918, 1922a; Loomis 1968; de la Torre y Callejas 1974; Mauriès 1980a, b; Krabbe and Enghoff 1985; Gonzales Oliver and Golovatch 1990; Hoffman 1999; Pérez-Asso and Pérez-Gelabert 2001; Pérez-Gelabert 2008), to which we add St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands (Appendix). The distribution continues through South America to northeastern Argentina, slicing across Peru and Bolivia north of the Atacama Desert and through northern San Luis and central Córdoba provs. Again, the question arises as to the southern limit, and we concur with Jeekel (1985) that it lies around Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, with a small, disjunct area in Chile (Demange and Silva 1971) that is subsumed within the larger Chilean area of Epinannolenidea ( Fig. 32 -33). Hoffman (1968a, 1980b) mapped the distribution of Urostreptus Silvestri, 1897 , but the southernmost Argentinean locality that we can find is Candelaria, San Luis Prov., for “ Spirostreptus ” bovei (Silvestri, 1895), which was designated a nomen dubium by Krabbe (1982). The southern terminus of Spirostreptidea in South America is therefore north of those of both Epinannolenidea ( Fig. 32 -33) and Spirobolida (Rhinocricidae) ( Fig. 28 ). However, Spirostreptidea’s New World distribution is largely congruent with that of Epinannolenidea ; both even have small, detached regions west of the Andes in Chile.

Spirostreptidea comprise three families in Africa and the Middle East – Spirostreptidae , Harpagophoridae , and Odontopygidae – and occupy four areas, three small and one large, that collectively span the Equator and both Tropics. The small, detached areas represent Spirostreptidae exclusively; two lie north of the Tropic of Cancer – those in Israel / West Bank / Lebanon, partly mapped by Shelley (2009), and in the Atlas Mts. of coastal Morocco – and the third is in the Aïr Mts., an inselberg in the central Sahara Desert in Niger ( Schubart 1951). We recognize a large, continuous area in sub-Saharan Africa that lies south of the Tropic of Cancer, spans the Equator and Tropic of Capricorn, and corresponds to the distribution of Odontopygidae (maps in Kraus 1960a, 1966), as Spirostreptidae and Harpagophoridae cover smaller areas within this larger one. It stretches from the Senegal River on the Senegal / Mauritania border in the west, to Eritrea in the east, curves gently northward on both ends, sags southward in the interior, and passes through Senegal, Mali, Burkina, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea. We extend it across the Red Sea to encompass spirostreptid occurrences in the southwestern Arabian Peninsula ( Saudi Arabia and Yemen) (Shelley 2009, Golovatch and Kime 2010), then southward into the Indian Ocean to encircle Madagascar plus the Seychelles, Comoros, Mauritius, and Rodriguez islands but excluding Sokotra, though the taxon may yet be found there. In the Atlantic, we enclose Bioko, São Tomé and Principe, and the Cape Verde Islands, though odontopygid occurrence in the last may be exogenous ( Enghoff 1993b). Jeekel’s map (1985) still depicts ordinal and subordinal distributions reasonably accurately in Africa and the Middle East; other papers with maps/locality listings include Kraus (1960a, 1966), Hoffman (1965b, 1991), and Hoffman and Howell (1996), but the type locality of Spirostreptus multisulcatus Demange, 1957 , appears to be in the Central African Republic instead of Chad ( Demange 1957). Pierrard (1972) published highly useful maps that show odontopygid localities in relation to political boundaries, enabling us to place the northern border. Forty-four endemic spirostreptidean ( Spirostreptidae ) species occur on Madagascar ( Enghoff 2003), and indigenous, if not endemic, species also inhabit the Seychelles, Rodriguez, Mauritius, and the Comoros islands ( Butler 1876, 1879; Mauriès 1980b; Golovatch and Korsós 1992; Mauriès and Geoffroy 1999; VandenSpiegel and Golovatch 2007). Hoffman (1993) characterized familial ranges in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Asia, Spirostreptidea occur on the Indian subcontinent (west to Mumbai and New Delhi), Myanmar, the Malay and Indochina peninsulas, southern China, Taiwan (Appendix), the Philippines, and Indonesia eastward through Halmahera; they have not been reported from the Island of New Guinea. Harpagophoridae comprise the entire area, with the one adiaphorostreptid occurring near Mumbai. The area spans both the Tropic of Cancer and Equator and lies south of the highest Himalayan peaks but slips across the mountains in Myanmar into Sichuan and Yunnan provs., China. On the east, it extends to Wallace’s Line and includes southern Indonesia, islands off the west coast of Sumatra, and the Nicobars, and we project Spirostreptidea for the Andaman Islands.

In addition to Jeekel’s map (1985), a map of the

border area in southeast Asia is provided by

Hoffman and Burkhalter (1978). Species lists are

available for the Himalayas (Golovatch and Mar-

tens 1996), Thailand (Enghoff 2005), Vietnam

( Enghoff et al. 2004), and China (D. Wang and

Mauriès 1996), in addition to the catalog of Asian

harpagophorids ( Jeekel 2006a).

Figures

Figure 28. Distribution of the Order Spirobolida, parameters as in Fig. 1. Inverted triangle, location of Gobiulus sabulosus Dzik, 1975, the Cretaceous fossil from Mongolia.

Figure 32. Known (solid lines) and projected (dashed lines) distributions of the Suborder Epinannolenidea. Parameters are as in Fig. 1, except the question marks in Australia represent general records from Northern Territory, South Australia, and northern Western Australia (Black 1997).

Figure 34-35. Distributions. 34) Known (solid lines) and projected (dashed lines) distributions of the Suborder Spirostreptidea, parameters as in Fig. 1. 35) Known (solid lines) and projected (dashed lines) distributions of the Superorder Nematophora, parameters as in Fig. 1; a few records are available from the dotted area in North America. The upper arrow denotes the Chordeumatida (Tingupidae) record from Kodiak Island, Alaska, USA, and the lower one denotes the known and projected distribution of Chordeumatida (Eudigonidae) in Chile.