Amplaria eldora (Chamberlin)

Shear, William A. & Krejca, Jean K., 2007, Revalidation of the milliped genus Amplaria Chamberlin 1941 (Diplopoda, Chordeumatida, Striariidae), and description of two new species from caves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, California, Zootaxa 1532, pp. 23-39 : 27

Amplaria eldora (Chamberlin)

Figs. 1, 2

Types: Three female syntypes from Crystal Cosumnes Cave, Eldorado Co., California, collected by A. Lang and G. Lange, 2 February 1952, whereabouts unknown.

Notes: Chamberlin (1953a) did not formally designate a holotype from among the three females available to him, and these specimens cannot be located; they are not in the USNM, where type material Chamberlin retained in his personal collection is now deposited. The specimens were part of a collection made by Edward Danehy and others in 1950 and 1951, and sent to Chamberlin for identification. The USNM does contain a vial labeled “ Striaria eldora Chamberlin , PARATYPE.” This single male specimen is from Grapevine Cave, Calaveras Co., California, and was collected 17 April 1951 by E. Jacobus. Morley Hardaker, of Davis, California, kindly provided us with information about Crystal Cosumnes Cave and Grapevine Cave:

“Crystal Cosumnes cave is near the little town of Fairplay in El Dorado County, and is located above the Middle Fork of the Cosumnes River…at about 2000 feet elevation….Grapevine Cave is about 36 air miles in a southerly direction and located about 3 miles east of the little town of Vallecito in Calaveras County. It is in a karst area high above and on the north side of the Stanislaus….Unlike Crystal Cosumnes its passages are maybe 20 to 30 feet below the surface, and many of its ceilings contain tree roots, some up to a couple feet in length. Grapevine is one of our richer caves in containing cave fauna. Millipedes and salamanders are commonly found here. I have personally seen millipedes in both caves on most trips.”

In a later paper, Chamberlin (1953b) mentioned this Grapevine Cave collection without specifying the sex or number of specimens, or designating the specimen as a type of any sort, so the museum labeling of it as a paratype has no formal standing. It would be a particularly maddening aspect of Chamberlin’s often capricious work if he had a male available but chose to describe the species from females. And why did he decide to describe two of the species from the Danehy collection separately ( Chamberlin 1953a), then just a few months later mix the descriptions of two more, plus more records of the first two, into a paper that was fundamentally about material from Honduras ( Chamberlin 1953b)? Furthermore, in a checklist published in 1958, only five years after reporting the male eldora specimen from Grapevine Cave, Chamberlin stated that eldora was “known only from the type locality ( Chamberlin and Hoffman 1958).” Chamberlin’s (1953) sketchy description of female eldora could apply to almost any species of medium-sized striariid, and so is of no help in determining the identity of this specimen. Until males from Crystal Cosumnes Cave appear, no harm is done by considering the Grapevine Cave male to be Amplaria eldora . However, as stated above, it remains to be proven that eldora is a junior synonym of eutypa , though we strongly suspect that it is.

The gonopods of the Grapevine Cave male are illustrated in figs. 1 and 2; unfortunately the specimen was in poor condition, but the distal parts of the gonopods are clearly distinct from other species now placed in Amplaria .

Figures

FIGURES 1 – 3. Amplaria eldora, Grapevine Cave specimen, male. 1. Right gonopod, lateral view; aac, anterior angiocoxite; pac, posterior angiocoxite; llcc, lateral lobe of colpocoxite; f, flagellocoxite. 2. Posterior angiocoxite of right gonopod, mesal view. 3. Tip of sheathing branch of posterior angiocoxite, mesal view.