Original paper
Pacific-Asian Biogeography with Examples from the Coleoptera
Gressitt, J. Linsley
Entomologia Generalis Volume 8 Number 1 (1982), p. 1 - 11
5 references
published: Dec 15, 1982
DOI: 10.1127/entom.gen/8/1982/1
ArtNo. ESP146000801000, Price: 29.00 €
Abstract
The oceanic islands of the Pacific in great part have separate more or less unique insect faunae locally evolved from ancestors which have successfully colonized at rare intervals on dispersing across wide tracts of ocean. Islands more distant from source areas have less harmonic faunae, of fewer familiae and genera, often with great range of form among descendents of a single ancestor. Islands nearer to the source areas have more evolutionary lines represented, and many diverge less from the continental relatives. Source areas for much of the oceanic fauna are the SE (and E) Asian fringes and continental islands. The Oriental fauna spreads eastward through the Malesian archipelago and eastward of Wallace’s Line there is more Australian and trans-Antarctic (Gondwanan) influence. However, contrary to the situation in terrestrial mammals, the insect fauna of the New Guinea area (Papuan Subregion) is largely Oriental. Some of the Australian elements are restricted to Australian type of savanna woodland in SE coastal areas of New Guinea with seasonal climate, just as some Papuan fauna occurs in rainforest pockets in NE Queensland. Most of New Guinea is covered with rainforest, which is primarily inhabited by insects of Oriental relationships. There is a great deal in common between New Guinea and the Philippines, either through Sulawesi or skipping it. In this sense New Guinea and the Philippines belong to an enlarged which belongs much more to the Oriental Region than to the Australian. Much of this Oriental Papuan fauna evolved during the past 10 000 000 years from colonizers from SE Asia after New Guinea was pushed up, largely in the Miocene and Pliocene, by the drifting of the Australian tectonic plate against the Pacific plate. The Papuan fauna is proving remarkably rich and diverse as more groups of insects are studied.
Keywords
Pacific Islands; Wallace Line; Papua