Dear colleagues,
Writing a complex article is a nightmare - check this, check that, and still
the errors manage to slip through. Perfection eludes always.
Since the Fauna of Australia book is likely to be considerably quoted I
should like to respectfully disagree with statements on p.189:
1) "... no foreign serpulids have become established in Australia as yet;
reports of European species such as Hydroides norvegicus and
Ficopomatus enigmaticus in Australian waters are erroneous."
F. enigmaticus occurs in Australia. Whether it is foreign or not to Australia
is open to (another) question, but it is a fact that the most numerous
records come from southern Europe and the Mediterranean. [Once I
inclined to the view that the Oz occurrences were unassisted, but these
days I tend to be more suspicious it is an alien to Australia. Hope someone
finds out one day.].
2) "... in revising the genus Ficopomatus the existence of numerous
'cosmopolitan' serpulid species has been shown to be false (ten Hove &
Weerdenburg 1978)."
This is less important, but I don't think any of 4 of the species concerned
were claimed elsewhere as cosmopolitan. The fifth is F. enigmaticus,
which in truth, and assuming no one is about to subdivide it, does get
around a bit on several continents, and thus is as suave a cosmopolitan as
you might meet. I can't see any statement about cosmopolitan species in
the quoted source.
Cheers,
--
Geoff Read <g.read at niwa.cri.nz>
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