Abstract
The genus Austropurcellia is a lineage of tiny leaf-litter arachnids that inhabit tropical rainforests throughout the eastern coast of Queensland, Australia. The majority of their diversity is found within the Wet Tropics rainforests of northeast Queensland, an area known for its exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and endemism. Studying the biogeographic history of limited-dispersal invertebrates in the Wet Tropics can provide insight into the role of climatic changes such as rainforest contraction in shaping rainforest biodiversity patterns. Here we describe six new species of mite harvestmen from the Wet Tropics rainforests, identified using morphological data, and discuss the biogeography of Austropurcellia with distributions of all known species. With this taxonomic contribution, the majority of the known diversity of the genus has been documented.
Highlights
The mite harvestmen are a globally distributed suborder of tiny (1.5–5 mm), cryptic arachnids that are extremely dispersal-limited, making them ideal for fine-scale historical biogeographic studies
All Queensland species were transferred to Austropurcellia by Boyer and Giribet (2007), including species originally described as members of the genera Neopurcellia Forster, 1948 and Rakaia Hirst, 1925, whose type species occur in New Zealand
These new species bring the total number of described species within Austropurcellia to 25, 21 of which are found within the World Heritage Area (WT) biodiversity hotspot (Fig. 1)
Summary
The mite harvestmen (order Opiliones, suborder Cyphophthalmi) are a globally distributed suborder of tiny (1.5–5 mm), cryptic arachnids that are extremely dispersal-limited, making them ideal for fine-scale historical biogeographic studies. Austropurcellia is a member of the family Pettalidae Shear, 1980, a lineage with a classical temperate Gondwanan distribution that includes species from Chile, South Africa, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Western Australia, and New Zealand (Boyer and Giribet 2007). Phylogenetic analyses of this group have demonstrated monophyly of all Queensland mite harvestmen (Boyer and Giribet 2007, Giribet et al 2012, Boyer et al 2015). Boyer et al (2015) presented six new species in a phylogenetic study of Austropurcellia, providing further insight into the historical biogeography of the genus. We identify several diagnostic characters that vary between groups of species whose ranges are geographically proximate, and use this information to form hypotheses about the new species’ phylogenetic relationships
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