Family GALUMNIDAE Jacot, 1925

Museums

Regional Maps

• Galumninae Jacot, A.P. 1925. Phylogeny in the Oribatoidea. American Naturalist 59: 272-279.

Introduction

The Galumnidae is a large and cosmopolitan family, including 50 genera and 461 species (Schatz et al. 2011). They occur in a wide variety of habitats, including pasture soil, forest litter, and rotting wood. Some species feed on economically important plants, both weeds and crop plants, while others feed on nematodes and other invertebrates (Norton & Behan-Pelletier 2009). The Australian Galumnidae are poorly known, with only 12 species in five genera. Unidentified species have been recorded from Australia a number of times as listed for each genus, and unidentified Galumnidae were also reported by Springett (1976), Heatwole et al. (1981), Stone & Simpson (1990), O'Dowd et al. (1991), Harvey et al. (1993), Callan et al. (2011), Beyer et al. (2011), Majer et al. (2013) and Walter & Stirling (2018).

General References

Beyer, S., Kinnear, A., Hutley, L.B., McGuiness, K. & Gibb, K. 2011. Assessing the relationship between fire and grazing on soil characteristics and mite communities in a semi-arid savanna of northern Australia. Pedobiologia 54: 195–200

Callan, S.K., Majer, J.D., Edwards, K. & Moro, D. 2011. Documenting the terrestrial invertebrate fauna of Barrow Island, Western Australia. Australian Journal of Entomology 50: 323–343

Harvey, M.S., Gray, M.R., Hunt, G.S. & Lee, D.C. 1993. The cavernicolous Arachnida and Myriapoda of Cape Range, Western Australia. pp. 129-144 in Humphreys, W.F. The Biogeography of Cape Range Western Australia. Records of the Western Australian Museum 45(Supplement)

Heatwole, H., Done, T. & Cameron, E. 1981. Community Ecology of a Coral Cay: A study of One-Tree Island, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The Hague : W. Junk 379 pp.

Majer, J.D., Callan, S.K., Edwards, K., Gunawardene, N.R. & Taylor, C.K. 2013. Baseline survey of the terrestrial invertebrate fauna of Barrow Island. Records of the Western Australian Museum, Supplement 83: 13-112.

O'Dowd, D.J., Brew, C.R., Christophel, D.C. & Norton, R.A. 1991. Mite-plant associations from the Eocene of southern Australia. Science (Washington, D.C.) 252: 99-101

Schatz, H., Behan-Pelletier, V.M., OConnor, B.M. & Norton, R.A. 2011. Suborder Oribatida van der Hammen, 1968. pp. 141–148 in Zhang, Z.-Q. Animal Biodiversity: An Outline of Higher-level Classification and Survey of Taxonomic Richness. Auckland : Magnolia Press.

Springett, J.A. 1976. The effect of planting Pinus pinaster Ait. on populations of soil microarthropods and on litter decomposition at Gnangara, Western Australia. Australian Journal of Ecology 1: 83-87

Stone, C. & Simpson, J.A. 1990. Species associations in Ips grandicollis galleries in Pinus taeda. New Zealand Journal of Forestry Science 20: 75-96.

Walter, D.E. & Stirling, G.R. 2018. Microarthropods in Australian sugarcane soils: A survey with emphasis on the Mesostigmata as potential regulators of nematode populations. Acarologia 58: 673-682.

History of changes