Abstract
Two new species of giant pill-millipedes, Zephronia viridisoma Rosenmejer & Wesener sp. nov. and Sphaerobelum aesculus Rosenmejer & Wesener sp. nov., are described based on museum samples from southern Thailand. Zephronia viridisoma sp. nov. comes from Khao Lak, while the type locality of S. aesculus sp. nov. is on Phuket Island. Both species are described integratively, combining light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, multi-layer photography, micro-CT scans and genetic barcoding. Genetic barcoding was successfully conducted for holotypes of both new species, which could be added to a dataset of all published sequences of the family Zephroniidae, including all described species from Thailand, Laos and Cambodia up to 2020. Genetic barcoding of the COI gene revealed another female of S. aesculus sp. nov., 160 km east of the type locality. Both new species are genetically distant from all other Zephroniidae from Thailand and surrounding countries, showing uncorrected p-distances of 16.8–23.1%. A virtual cybertype of a paratype of Z. viridisoma sp. nov. was created and made publically accessible.
Highlights
Thailand harbours an extremely rich and highly endemic biota
We describe two new giant pill-millipede species from Thailand integratively, combining morphology with genetic barcodes, and creating a freely accessible cybertype for one of the new species
Sphaerobelum aesculus Rosenmejer & Wesener sp. nov. was retrieved in an isolated position and differed from the closest related species (Fig. 1), a Zephroniidae species (Zephroniidae_spII) of an unknown genus obtained from pet trade of Malaysia, European Journal of Taxonomy 762: 108–132 (2021)
Summary
Thailand harbours an extremely rich and highly endemic biota This unique biodiversity, which to a high extent is associated with limestone karsts, is under threat, mainly from anthropogenic habitat destruction. From the time when the first species were recorded from “Siam” by Karsch (1881) and until the first comprehensive list of Thai millipedes was published by Enghoff (2005), 105 species had been recorded, but due to a massive effort by Professor Somsak Panha and his ( former) students from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, in collaboration with foreign specialists, the following 14 years saw a dramatic increase to 228 species (Likhitrakarn et al 2019), and the number is still growing: with the contributions by Pimvichai et al (2020), Wesener et al (2021) and Likhitrakarn et al (2021), and including the two species described here, 243 millipede species are known from Thailand. Only five species of Sphaerotheriida have been recorded from Thailand, viz., Zephronia siamensis Hirst, 1907 (Hirst 1907), Z. cf. viridescens Attems, 1936 (recorded by Wongthamwanich et al 2013), Sphaerobelum truncatum Wongthamwanich, 2012 (Wongthamwanich et al 2012), and – very recently – Zephronia lannaensis Likhitrakarn & Golovatch, 2021, and Z. phrain Likhitrakarn & Golovatch, 2021 (Likhitrakarn et al 2021)
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