I have been going through scutigerid observations posted in the US, and I’ve noticed a few, mostly from Texas, that don’t resemble any US species.
Most of them have orange-ish tubercules that are touching or nearly touching, which isn’t seen in any species known from here.
Does anyone happen to know what they might be?
Here’s some of the observations:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/148918277
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/141186217
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/139805599
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/151095631
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/149724242
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/148866869
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(IDs on iNat itself, not on the Forum)
You can @mention https://www.inaturalist.org/people/szucsich on your obs - and see if he can help. I had to abandon an obs where he couldn’t help us further. Not enough detail on our photo for an ID.
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The fact that the locations are clustered in Texas is interesting. Thereuopoda look kinda similar, but this is a group of centipedes I know very little about.
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There is another invasive species that could be this species, Thereuonema tuberculata. I know a few months ago there was a group that was going through these obs and trying to ID them, maybe you could get in touch with them.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/423714-Thereuonema-tuberculata
The fact that only 12 species of scutigerid total come up on a global search on the Explore page suggests that this is one of many groups that are either difficult to ID from photos, or need more identifiers, or (usually) both.
I’m pretty sure this species was checked, those observations look different from Thereuonema tuberculata.
(1) A question in return would be - what species are you considering as recorded in Texas so far?
For example, Scutigera buda Chamberlin, 1944 - Described from Buda, Hayes country, Texas. Seems long forgotten besides lists, the description is online here.
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2784345#page/51/mode/1up
(Note, from what i know of Chamberlin’s works in other arthropods- take care with the reality of his suggested ‘new species’. At least for spiders, later studies have shown that he proposed several redundantly, or needlessly over-split. I’d therefore be cautious about his myriapods - but on a plus side, he also records ‘coleoptrata’ and ‘linceci’ separately in that same study, so he must have thought them distinctive.
(2) For the taxonomy, are you trusting the taxonomic scheme for the taxa on the system here, and/or the scheme on bugguide?
I’m just noticing both sites are lacking in the myriapods (i mean - so take those schemes with caution, i.e. not comprehensive nor current), I knew buggguide tends to omit a few rarities, but i’m rather surprised that not even all USA species of these seem to be on here.
For example "inceci: has been listed for several years by Mexican researchers instead as Dendrothereua linceci (Wood, 1867). Seems trasfered sometime after was as Scutigera in this work Edgecombe & Cupul-Magaña 2008. http://dugesiana.cucba.udg.mx/index.php/DUG/article/view/3846/3625
Not sure where the transfer was made, but see on the “literature” tab here are several later works. https://myriatrix.myspecies.info/myriatrix/dendrothereua-linceci
Note, i’d also trust the taxonomy here more than even ChiloBase 2.0, and the genus changed sometime around 2010, not sure in which work exactly. [Edit - the transfer is in phylogenetics paper of Edgecombe and Giribet 2009, but seems like might be miss some key term required by ICZN for accepting validity, i.e. “Stat Rev.” or “Comb. nov”, the paper is recognised in ChiloBase 2.0 but then that “proposal” is ignored - ?rejected]
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I guess I was considering everything that I could find photos for online, which unfortunately isn’t very many species.
The Myriapod taxonomy on iNat should be tied to Chilobase and Millibase at present https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/curator+guide#authorities but I increasingly get the impression that a discussion needs to be had about this.
Another odd one, this time from NC. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/152410303
And a new Texas one https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/152111622
Right now I’m have great fun learning about these… but that’s all I can say for sure! I do not think the NC one is the same as the others we are looking at.
Yeah, that one is different, but still quite unusual for the location
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