Family TROMBIDIIDAE Leach, 1815

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Regional Maps

• Trombidides Leach, W.E. 1815. A tabular view of the external characters of four classes of animals, which Linné arranged under Insecta; with the distribution of the genera composing three of these classes into orders &c. and descriptions of several new genera and species. Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 11: 306-400.

Introduction

Adults and deutonymphs of mites in the family Trombidiidae are large and brightly coloured, and covered with a dense coat of fine setae, and for that reason they are commonly known as red velvet mites (Walter et al. 2009). They are predators that feed on a wide variety of small soft-bodied insects and mites, and may contribute to the control of some agricultural pests, including aphids (Gerson et al. 2003). The larvae are parasites of insects and other invertebrates. The Australian fauna includes nine genera and 31 species, most of which were reviewed by Southcott (1986). The world fauna was reviewed thoroughly by Mąkol (2007), who made extensive changes to the generic classification, and the world fauna was then catalogued by Mąkol & Wohltmann (2012). Unidentified species have been recorded from Australia a number of times as listed for each genus, and unidentified Trombidiidae were also reported by Heatwole et al. (1981), Callan et al. (2011) and Majer et al. (2013).

General References

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

Gerson, U., Smiley, R.L. & Ochoa, R. 2003. Mites (Acari) for Pest Control. Oxford : Blackwell Science 539 pp.

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.

Mąkol, J. 2007. Generic level review and phylogeny of Trombidiidae and Podothrombiidae (Acari: Actinotrichida: Trombidioidea) of the world. Annales Zoologici, Warszawa 57: 1–194

Mąkol, J. & Wohltmann, A. 2012. An annotated checklist of terrestrial Parasitengona (Actinotrichida: Prostigmata) of the world, excluding Trombiculidae and Walchiidae. Annales Zoologici, Warszawa 62: 359–562

Southcott, R.V. 1986. Studies on the taxonomy and biology of the subfamily Trombidiinae (Acarina : Trombidiidae) with a critical revision of the genera. Australian Journal of Zoology Supplementary Series 123: 1-116

Walter, D.E., Lindquist, E.E., Smith, I.M., Cook, D.R. & Krantz, G.W. 2009. Order Trombidiformes. pp. 233-420 in Krantz, G.W. & Walter, D.E. (eds). A Manual of Acarology. Lubbock, Texas : Texas Tech University Press Third edition, 807 pp.

History of changes