#Notozomus ker

[rattyexplores]

Photos 1-2 - Notozomus ker, female

Photos 3-4 - Notozomus ker, male

Schizomida arachnids (or Shorttailed whipscorpions), identified on iNaturalist as N. ker. using information from Harvey (1992).

For whatever reason there's a lacklustre amount of Australian Schizomida observations on iNaturalist. There's a wide variety of Australian Schizomids out there, with many new species being uncovered fairly recently in Abrams et al. (2019) for example.

Any sort of public record of these arachnids (or just terrestrial arthropods in general) will be very useful, especially since, in general, iNaturalist is lacking observations of Schizomida. Abrams et al. (2019) mentions that there are roughly 350 species of Schizomid out there, but so far, only 23 have been identified on iNaturalist. I feel iNaturalist provides good public records, so the more available on the website, the better.

I'm going to continue flipping over rocks and rotten logs for more Schizomids (and creatures in general), and I implore others to do the same. There's a lot that can be found hiding in the mulch.

*BTW these are not spiders, they're a different Chelicerate entirely.

Sources and further reading:

Harvey, MS 1992 'Schizomida (Chelicerata) of Australia', Invertebrate taxonomy, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 77-129.

Abrams, KM, Huey, JA, Hillyer, MJ, Humphreys, WF, Didham, RK, Harvey, MS 2019, 'Too hot to handle: Cenozoic aridification drives multiple independent incursions of Schizomida (Hubbardiidae) into hypogean environments', Molecular phylogenetics and evolution, vol. 139, p. 106532.

24/10/23 - Schizomida: Notozomus ker

QLD:WET