Australian Biological Resources Study

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Family EVIPHIDIDAE Berlese, 1913

Introduction

The family Eviphididae in Australia was very poorly known, but has recently been revised (Halliday 2010). The known Australian fauna now consists of 14 species in four genera. The European fauna includes 29 species (Mašán & Halliday 2010), so we may expect the world total to exceed 150 species when more international collections are studied in depth. The Australian species are found in soil and dung, seaweed, and other types of decaying organic matter, where they appear to feed on nematodes. At least one species may be a beneficial predator of pest nematodes. Many species are phoretic on insects, especially dung beetles, except the genus Evimirus, which occurs in litter on the forest floor, and is not phoretic. Several other genera occur in that habitat in other countries (Lindquist et al. 2009), but the non-phoretic genera are under-represented in Australia. Lowry (1980) and Proctor et al. (2011) recorded unidentified Eviphididae from Western Australia and Queensland respectively. Adolphson & Kinnear (2008) also recorded unidentified species of Eviphididae in Western Australia, but these specimens were later shown to belong to the family Laelapidae (Halliday 2010).

 

History of changes

Note that this list may be incomplete for dates prior to September 2013.
Published As part of group Action Date Action Type Compiler(s)
07-May-2013 07-May-2013 MODIFIED
06-Nov-2011 06-Nov-2011 MOVED
08-Aug-2010 08-Aug-2010 MOVED
09-Jul-2010 09-Jul-2010 ADDED
08-Jul-2010 MODIFIED