More slug(gish) science: Another annotated catalogue on types of tropical pulmonate slugs (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the collection of the Natural History Museum Berlin

Abstract

While the most fundamental question as to how many species inhabit the earth still remains to be one of the enigmatic aspects of biodiversity, it continues to be the challenge for systematists to cope with taxonomic redundancy. Synonymies, being in the past essentially produced due to the dominating typological approach to deal with morphological disparity and taxonomical diversity, are at the heart of this problem. Therefore, the type procedure established as nomenclatural practice has not lost its usefulness. Quite to the contrary, types as name-bearing specimens deserve our full attention, more today than ever before. Supplementing a preceeding paper on a total of 43 extant types of mostly vaginulid and agriolimacid slugs originally described by the German zoologist Heinrich Simroth, we in this second catalogue compile information on other tropical slugs in the Malacozoological Collection of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. We here list a total of 36 slug types described by several other authors, with the majority being again Vaginulidae (n = 30). In addition, information on six types of slugs from three other families, viz. Limacidae (3), Urocyclidae (2), and Agriolimacidae (1), are given, following a brief account with biographic information on those collectors who have contributed the majority of this type collection of vaginulids and related slugs. We end with a brief discussion of the geographic occurrence of these taxa involved. (© 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)