Reports of Drawida (Oligochaeta: Moniligastridae) from far East Asia

Abstract

The Moniligastridae Claus, 1880 presumably arose in a region now occupied by the Malay Archipelago sufficiently long enough ago to have widely colonized and speciated in the Far East and to have radiated westwards even as the Himalayas formed to occupy the Indian subcontinent as far as Sri Lanka (Michaelsen, 1909; 1922; Gates, 1972). A less popular alternative is the family has “recent Indian origin” colonizing Asia after collision of the Indian Plate (Easton, 1981: 34), although most authors agree on a southern Indian homeland concentration for genus Drawida speciation. Along with holarctic Lumbricidae in the Northern Hemisphere, Acanthodrilidae in the Southern Ocean and Octochaetidae in Indo-Australasia, it is considered one of the most naturally widespread of earthworm families (Gates, 1972; Blakemore, 2013c). It currently has approximately 215 valid species in six genera (Csuzdi, 2012), mainly in South Asia and southeast Asia. The family diminishes further East, or rather its taxonomic study does; for example, Kobayashi (1940: 311) reporting on Manchurian worms listed less than a dozen East Asian species although these are still important in agricultural and ecological studies to this day. Only a few are peregrine cosmopolitans (Blakemore, 2012b), in particular Drawida barwelli (Beddard, 1893) is widely transported in the tropics, e.g. first Australasian moniligastrid report by Blakemore (1994), albeit many records of this small worm are likely mistaken as it was confused even in its earliest descriptions. A major difficulty with moniligastrid description, apart Journal of Species Research 3(2):127-166, 2014