Order AMPHIPODA Latreille, 1816

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Order AMPHIPODA Latreille, 1816

Compiler and date details

James K. Lowry

Introduction

As insects dominate the earth's terrestrial environment, the amphipods are their aquatic equivalent. They are abundant and diverse in nearly all of the world's marine habitats and many of its freshwater habitats including its ancient artesian basins.

The world amphipods have been monographed several times. Stebbing (1906) monographed the world species for the first and last time. J.L. Barnard (1969) monographed the families and genera of marine amphipods and Barnard & Barnard (1983) monographed the world families and genera of freshwater amphipods and provided species lists. Barnard & Karaman (1991) monographed the marine families and genera with lists of all species. At that time there were about 1060 genera and about 5700 known species of gammaridean amphipods.

Amphipods differ from other peracaridan groups as follows. The legs (known as pereopods) are modified into three groups. The first two pairs are known as gnathopods and are generally used for grasping. The next two pairs, pereopods 3 and 4, face posteriorly and the last three pairs, pereopods 5 to 7, are usually stouter than pereopods 3 and 4 and are directed anteriorly. There are only three pairs of pleopods. The fourth and fifth pairs are modified to form uropods so that amphipods have three pair of uropods.

Amphipods are traditionally divided into four groups: the gammarideans, which are almost certainly paraphyletic. The caprellideans, also paraphyletic, are distinguished by their elongate cylindrical bodies and general lack of an abdomen, the hyperiideans, entirely pelagic marine animals which have all lost the palp on their maxillipeds and ingolfiellideans, a small, obscure group, highly modified for an interstitial life-style. These groups have never been tested in a modern phylogenetic sense. Martin & Davis (2001) discuss this problem.

Synopsis of Australian Amphipod Taxonomy
Australian amphipod taxonomy started with W.A. Haswell, the first Professor of Zoology at Sydney University. He was a general carcinologist, who during his career described 76 species of amphipods, mainly from Port Jackson N.S.W. This early work of Haswell (1879a, 1879b, 1880a, 1880b, 1882, 1885a, 1885b) set the stage for Australian amphipod systematics. Although many of Haswell's names remain in use, most of his species were poorly described. The status of his types has always caused confusion (Springthorpe & Lowry 1994), but early collections of many of his species are held in the Australian Museum and have been frequently used for redescriptions.

Although T.R.R. Stebbing never visited Australia he made a significant contribution to the systematics of Australian amphipods. Stebbing (1888) described 24 Australian species from the Challenger Expedition. Later Stebbing (1910) studied the amphipod collections from the Thetis Expedition off the coast of Sydney. In this work he described an additional 13 new species and made the second checklist of the known amphipod fauna of Australia (about 182 species). Between 1888 and 1914 Stebbing described 47 species of Australian amphipods.

The next important monographer of Australian amphipods was Keith Sheard, who worked as an honorary assistant at the South Australian Museum from 1936–1939. He studied mainly on phliantid, dexaminid and melitid amphipods and added 16 species to the Australian fauna. Sheard produced the third checklist of the Australian amphipod fauna known at that time. By this time the fauna had grown to 190 species.

After Sheard little progress was made on Australian amphipods until the late 1960's when J.L. Barnard (Smithsonian Institution) came to Perth (Lowry 1993) to study for a year. He produced several major monographs which solved many existing problems in Australian marine amphipod taxonomy and described much of what is known of the shallow water south-western amphipod fauna (1972, 1974) before collaborating with the M.M. Drummond (Victorian State Fisheries and Museum Victoria) to produce their remarkable monographs on Australian phoxocephaloid (1978, 1979, 1982c, 1991), oedicerotoid (1982a, 1983, 1984a, 1984b, 1992) and other (1981, 1982b, 1987a, 1987b) amphipods. Some of his later works on Australian amphipods (Barnard & Thomas 1991 and Thomas & Barnard 1990, 1991a, 1991b) were co-authored with J.D. Thomas (Nova Southeastern University). Barnard also worked with W.D. Williams (University of Adelaide) on Australian freshwater amphipods (Williams & Barnard, 1988 and Barnard & Williams, 1995). This work has been developed further by Williams and Bradbury (1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 1999). Since his death in 1992 several additional papers (Barnard 1999 and Lowry & Barnard 2000) on Australian amphipods have appeared. Between 1961 and 1999 Barnard and his co-authors described nearly 230 species of Australian marine amphipods. This body of work has dominated Australian amphipod taxonomy and made possible the modern study of the Australian fauna.

A.M.M. Richardson (University of Tasmania) has worked on the systematics of Australian talitrid amphipods (beach hoppers) for years (Richardson & Devitt 1984; Richardson, Swain & Smith 1991; Richardson 1993). A. Friend (1979, 1987) described the terrestrial talitrid amphipods of Tasmania. Friend worked as the first visiting fellow at the Australian Museum where his studies on mainland Australian terrestrial amphipods began (Friend 1982). He is in the process of finishing a major monograph on the mainland terrestrial amphipod fauna.

J.K. Lowry came to the Australian Museum in 1976 and H.E. Stoddart arrived soon after. After initial studies on Australian and New Zealand subantarctic amphipods (Lowry & Fenwick 1983; Lowry & Stoddart 1983), Lowry and Stoddart (1984, 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995) began their studies of the lysianassoid amphipods of Australia and the Australasian region. There are about 200 species in their collections, which are in the process of being described and published.

J.K. Lowry and G.C.B. Poore (Museum of Victoria) monographed the ampeliscid amphipods of south-eastern Australia and described the first ingolfiellid amphipods from Australia (Lowry & Poore 1985, 1989).

P.B. Berents worked on the melitid amphipods of the Great Barrier Reef (Berents 1983) as a master's student at the University of Sydney. As part of her PhD project Berents described a new genus and species of urohaustoriid (1985) from Jervis Bay, N.S.W. In 1988 Berents became the collection manager (Australian Museum) responsible for crustacean collections and co-ordinated the databasing of the crustaceans collections. Lowry and Berents (Lowry, 1981a; Lowry & Berents 1996; Lowry & Berents in press) have an ongoing research project on Australasian cerapid amphipods.

A.A. Myers (National University of Ireland) worked as a visiting fellow at the Australian Museum in 1986 and produced a number of important papers on Australian aorid amphipods (Myers 1975, 1981, 1985, 1988; Myers & Moore 1983).

P.G. Moore (University Marine Biological Station Millport, Isle of Cumbrae, Scotland) studied collections made by G. Edgar (Charles Darwin Research Station, Galapagos) in Tasmania and produced a series of papers (1981, 1982, 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1988a, 1988b, 1989, 1992; Myers & Moore, 1988) which have described nearly 30 species, mainly from Tasmania.

W. Vader came as a visiting fellow to the Australian Museum in 1993 to work on the SEAS Project (Scavengers of Eastern Australian Seas). During that time he discovered a diverse group of undescribed amphipods associated with hermit crabs. Vader (1995) and Vader & Myers (1996) are producing a series of papers on these amphipods.

Freewater & Lowry (1994) and Poore & Lowry (1997), more recently, described a number of new ampithoid amphipods from Port Jackson.

J. Just came to Australia in 1983 as an exchange curator between the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen and the Australian Museum. During this time he began studies on Australian amphipods. He soon returned permanently to Australia where he worked at the Museum of Victoria and as the Director of Faunal Studies at the Australian Biological Resources Survey. Just (1983, 1985, 1990, 1998, 2001) has produced a series of excellent papers on the siphonoecetine and iphimedioid amphipods.

Wolfgang Zeidler began working on hyperiidean amphipods in late 1970s, a group of pelagic amphipods with wide distributions. Between 1978 and 1999 Zeidler has recorded about 120 hyperiidean species in Australian waters (1978, 1984, 1992a, 1992b, 1999). According the Zeidler (pers. comm.) if the deepwater hyperiidean fauna of Australia were known, then most of the world's species would be recorded from Australian waters.

The caprellidean fauna is currently being studied by J.M. Guerra-Garcia (University of Seville, Spain) and I. Takeuchi (Eihme University, Japan) who are describing about 25 new species. Lowry & Springthorpe are revising the Australian melitid amphipods. The Australian ampithoid amphipods are currently being studied by R. Peart (Australian Museum), who is describing about 60 new species from Australian waters. Coleman (Natural History Museum, Berlin) is describing about 20 species of iphimedioid amphipods from Australian waters.

The Australian Amphipod Project, started in 2000 by Jim Lowry, is a web-based study which provides monographs and interactive keys to all Australian marine species. It is available on the web at www.crustacea.net/crustace/amphipoda/aus_intro. To date we have developed monographs and keys to the Australian Ampeliscidae, Aoridae, Eusiridae, Hyalidae, Leucothoidae and Melitidae (Lowry & Springthorpe 2000; Lowry, Berents & Springthorpe 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2000d, 2001), 99 families and about 180 species.

A new suborder, Senticaudata, established by Lowry and Myers (2013) rearranged many of the amphipod groups.

Lowry & Myers (2017) propose a revised classification for the order Amphipoda, with six suborders: Pseudingolfiellidea, Hyperiidea, Colomastigidea, Hyperiopsidea, Senticaudata and Amphilochidea. Ingolfiellidea is raised to order status.

Diagnosis

Carapace absent; thoracomere 1 fused to head (bearing maxillipeds). Eyes sessile. Antenna 1 typically biramous (inner ramus reduced). Maxillipeds with basal and ischial endites. Thoracopods 2–8 (pereopods 1–7) uniramous, coxae forming plates. Pereopods modifications. Pleopods 4–6 modified as uropods. Young released from brood pouch at fully-formed adults. Male with paired penes on sternum of pereonite 7; female gonopores on pereonite 5.

Published	As part of group	Action Date	Action Type	Compiler(s)
03-Sep-2018	AMPHIPODA Latreille, 1816	31-May-2018	MODIFIED	Dr Shane Ahyong
09-Oct-2013	AMPHIPODA	29-Apr-2013	MODIFIED	Dr Jim Lowry (AM)
05-Aug-2022		06-Feb-2013	MODIFIED
		12-Feb-2010	(import)

Australian Biological Resources Study

Australian Faunal Directory