Two New Species of Globular Springtails Found in Taiwan

The hexapod class Collembola, also known as springtail, is an abundant and species-rich group of microarthropods commonly found on the surface of plants and rocks and in the leaf litter and soil, but yet its global diversity is poorly understood. A research group from the Department of Life Science and the Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary at the National Taiwan University reports two new species of this group in Taiwan. Both of these species were originally identified as Ptenothrix denticulata (Folsom, 1899), a species that have been widely reported from both sides of the Pacific Ocean. However, morphological and molecular analyses unequivocally indicate that the springtails found in Taiwan belong to two unknown species. This revisionary study also designates a lectotype for P. denticulata after examining its syntypes. This study removes P. denticulata from the country’s collembolan checklist and increases the species richness to 59.

Read the full article, published by Zoological Studies, here

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