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www.OVULIDAE.com
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The state of research of living Ovulidae, Pediculariidae and Eocypraeidae
by Felix Lorenz The history of taxonomic work of the allied cowries reveals that until the times of colourful publications such as Sowerby's Thesaurus, very few species of Ovulidae were named. At the same time, one third of all cowry species had been named at least once. One reason is certainly the lack of material, as most Ovulids are subtidal, but on the other hand, many deep-water species of other families had then been known, e.g. from museum's expeditions. The invention of Scuba-diving on the other hand seems to have had less impact on the account of new species than in other families. Few of the taxa named by Cate were obtained by divers but usually came from the fishing industry and beach-collecting. |
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The diagram reveals that the account of taxa rose slowly for two hundred years and then got doubled by the work of Cate 1973. Many of the taxa introduced since are higher-level (genus and subfamily-level) while half of the taxa Cate introduced are nowadays considered synonyms. Both graphs show the same trend, except for the missing step of valid taxa out of those 19 introduced by Tryon. The distinct step of Cate's 1973 work is obvious, as well as the more steady rise of new taxa introduced since, until today. black line: including synonyms |
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Today, we still have a fairly fragmentary overview to ovulid-occurrences. Diversity seems greatest in the western Pacific, namely the Philippines and Japan, but this impression is deceiving because those are the areas most intensely investigated. On the few occasions in which sampling has been conducted by experienced collectors in other places, a surprising amount of species was found. It turns out that most species considered endemic to Japan, after being discovered in the Philippines, have distributions stretching across the Indo Pacific, from western Polynesia to South Africa. The least known areas are those with the most intense activity of Scuba-divers, namely the Red Sea and the Maldives. There is a lot of evidence that ovulids thrive in these areas, but apart from photographs of living animals there is very little material available to taxonomists. Other areas which urgently need to be investigated better are the entire East African coast, the Persian Gulf, the central Indian Ocean, the coasts of India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Myanmar and Thailand, as well as the Indian Ocean coasts of Indonesia. There are areas in the Caribbean which are very poorly investigated, and finally, the entire western coast of Africa is less well known than the deep water seamounts in the central Atlantic. |
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Ovulid-distribution and state of research:
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