The Psocoptera (Insecta) of Wilsons Promontory National Park, Victoria, Australia

Memoirs of the Museum of Victoria 53(2): 137-220 (1992) THE PSOCOPTERA (INSECTA) OF WILSONS PROMONTORY NATIONAL PARK, VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA By E. R. Schmidt and I. W. B. Thornton Department of Zoology, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria 3083, Australia Abstract Schmidt, E.R. and Thornton, I.W.B., 1992. The Psocoptera (Insecta) of Wilsons Prom- ontory National Park. Victoria. Australia. Memoirs of the Museum of Victoria 53: 1 37-220. Psocoptera (psocids) were collected by beating from a wide range of habitat associations at Wilsons Promontory National Park, Victoria. Eleven different habitats were regularly sampled over a 1 3-month period during 1 985-1 986 and additional habitats were extensively sampled at other times. Sixty-eight species were collected, representing 25 genera in 1 1 families. Twenty-four species are newly described and further descriptions provided for nine species. The fauna is richer than that found in surveys of other regions of south-eastern Australia but the a diversity index (a = 10.74) is similar to that found at Muogamarra Nature- Reserve, near Sydney, NSW. The large number of plant associations at Wilsons Promontory appears to be the most likely explanation for the relative richness of the psocopteran fauna. Keywords: Psocoptera; Wilsons Promontory; Bass Strait zoogeography, faunal diversity. Introduction The Psocoptera (psocids) is one of the smaller and lesser-known insect orders. About 3500 species of 36 families are known and the insects occur commonly in all zoogeographical regions. Several species are cosmopolitan and others have wide tropical ranges. Many species, how- ever, have limited distributions giving rise to regional faunas. Several islands and archipel- agos of the inner and outer Melanesian arcs in the west and south-west Pacific, New Guinea and adjacent Indonesian islands contain such faunas, which recently have prompted infer- ences concerning systematics and biogeographi- cal distributions (Smithers and Thornton, 1981 and references therein. 1990; Thornton et al., 1988; Thornton, 1989 and references therein). Surveys of the Muogamarra Nature Reserve, near Sydney (Smithers, 1 977), and of South Aus- tralia (Smithers, 1984) indicated that the tem- perate Australian psocopteran fauna is diverse and little known. Earlier records from Victoria are predominantly by New (1973a, 1973b, 1974a, 1974b) and Thornton and New (1977). More recently a survey of two isolated inland regions of Victoria, The Grampians and Mt Arapiles (Endersby et al., 1990) yielded 32 species, raising the known species in Victoria to 61. Investigations of the fauna of the Bass Strait islands (Cole et al., 1 989) and the Otway Ranges (Thomas, 1986) have been made and the fauna of Tasmania is currently being studied. A survey of the fauna of south-eastern Australian highland areas was made in early 1990, and is now being analysed. Mackerras ( 1 970) regarded the insect fauna of south-eastern Australia as comprising predomi- nantly the southern element of Australia's fauna, some groups showing affinities with New Zealand, New Caledonia, southern cool temper- ate South America and (to a lesser extent) South Africa. These disjunctions appear to reflect his- torical Gondwanan connections via Antarctica. Pleistocene lowering of sea level was sufficient to expose a land bridge, the Bassian Rise, connecting southern Victoria via Flinders Island to Tasmania (Blom, 1988; Rawlinson, 1974) (Map A). Changes in world climate, associated vegetation shifts and intermittent land connec- tions probably occurred often, causing repeated isolation and fusion of habitats conducive to speciation. Thus, south-eastern Australia, par- ticularly Tasmania and the Bass Strait region, is an area well suited for investigations of patterns of distribution and evolution of Psocoptera. Thirty-one described species are known from mainland Tasmania (Edwards, 1950; Hickman, 1934; Smithers. 1979) and 33 from the Bass Strait Islands (Cole etal., 1989;New, 1971). The relationships of the fauna of the Bass Strait islands to those of Tasmania and southern Vic- toria were assessed by Cole et al. (1989) but several species remain to be described from this survey. In addition, current studies of the faunas of both mainland Tasmania and the areas of southern Victoria mentioned above have 137