More slug(gish) science: Another annotated catalogue on types of tropical pulmonate slugs (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the collection of the Natural History Museum Berlin

Abstract

While the most fundamental question as to how many species inhabit the earth still remains to be one of the enigmatic aspects of biodiversity, it continues to be the challenge for systematists to cope with taxonomic redundancy. Synonymies, being in the past essentially produced due to the dominating typological approach to deal with morphological disparity and taxonomical diversity, are at the heart of this problem. Therefore, the type procedure established as nomenclatural practice has not lost its usefulness. Quite to the contrary, types as name‐bearing specimens deserve our full attention, more today than ever before. Supplementing a preceeding paper on a total of 43 extant types of mostly vaginulid and agriolimacid slugs originally described by the German zoologist Heinrich Simroth, we in this second catalogue compile information on other tropical slugs in the Malacozoological Collection of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. We here list a total of 36 slug types described by several other authors, with the majority being again Vaginulidae (n = 30). In addition, information on six types of slugs from three other families, viz. Limacidae (3), Urocyclidae (2), and Agriolimacidae (1), are given, following a brief account with biographic information on those collectors who have contributed the majority of this type collection of vaginulids and related slugs. We end with a brief discussion of the geographic occurrence of these taxa involved. (© 2012 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

New species and records of terrestrial slugs from East Africa (Gastropoda, Urocyclidae, Veronicellidae, Agriolimacidae)

“…Van Goethem (1977) is indispensible for redescriptions, details of previous citations and type material of Urocyclidae ; note that most of Simroth’s types could not be found by Van Goethem, and have still not been found (e.g. in the collections at Berlin; Glaubrecht 2010 , Glaubrecht and Zorn 2012 ).…”

“…As with many of Simroth’s types, the types of A. puncatum are presumed lost ( Van Goethem 1977 , Glaubrecht 2010 , Glaubrecht and Zorn 2012 ). Verdcourt’s three-part biography of F. L. Stuhlmann ( Verdcourt 1988 , 1989a , b ) included a list of taxa collected by Stuhlmann that were possibly present in the Berlin collections in 1959.…”

Annotated type catalogue of the Orthalicoidea (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

“…Sievers; Hermann Strebel (1834–1915), see below; A. Stübel (no further data available); Johannes Thiele (1860–1935); and Franz H. Troschel (1816–1882). Brief information on the origin of the ZMB collection and the contributions of several persons mentioned above may also be found in Richling and Glaubrecht (2008), Tëmkin et al (2009), Glaubrecht and Zorn (2012).…”

Annotated type catalogue of lymnaeid snails (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the collection of the Natural History Museum, Berlin

“…A brief information on the origin of the collection and its founders and former curators may be found in Glaubrecht and Zorn (2012) that allows me to omit it here. From the nomenclatorial point of view, the most valuable part of ZMB collection is that including the type materials of species described either by ZMB employes and associates (von Martens, Simroth, Thiele) or by scientists from other scientific institutions and / or countries.…”

“…In total, more than ten papers devoted to examination of the ZMB type materials have appeared in the last two decades. Most of them deal with terrestrial snails and slugs of various families (Köhler 2007;Glaubrecht and Zorn 2012;Breure 2013), others are devoted to cephalopods (Glaubrecht and Salcedo-Vargas 2000), freshwater snails (Köhler and Glaubrecht 2006), and brakishwater bivalves (Glaubrecht et al 2007).…”