Distribution
Other slug species in this family are found in Turkey and Georgia, but no representatives have been found and described in Western Europe prior to this discovery. Although the species is almost certainly introduced, its country of origin and how it made its way into Britain was unknown at the time of its original description. Bill Symondson speculated that the slug originally evolved in cave systems alien to the UK, and may possibly have arrived in Wales in soil in a potted plant.
The first specimen was collected in the churchyard of Brecon cathedral on 29 December 2004, but its significance was overlooked at the time. A second specimen was found in a lane in Caerphilly on 29 October 2006. This single specimen was photographed and then released. A year later, another slug was found by a gardener near Cardiff, Wales, where it was brought to the attention of the National Museum Wales. Additional ghost slugs have been found in Gorseinon, near Swansea, Wales, Hay-on-Wye (Welsh Borders), and Knowle, near Bristol, England.
The slug is not harmful to humans, but as a presumed introduced species, more records from Britain are being solicited, partly on the basis of an appeal to the public. As more information is gathered, the distribution of the species will be monitored to check that it does not become an invasive pest species as it presumably spreads across South Wales.
In 2012, a specimen of what is probably the same species, Selenochlamys cf. ysbryda, was rediscovered in the Crimean mountains in Ukraine. A single immature specimen had been collected in a natural mountain forest in 1989. This is the first record of Trigonochlamydidae in Crimea. This Crimean specimen differs from Selenochlamys pallida in the same way as does S. ysbryda, so it most likely belongs to the latter species. This slug could be a native to the Crimean Mountains and perhaps endemic there.
Selenochlamys ysbryda was selected as one of "The Top 10 New Species" described in 2008 by The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and an international committee of taxonomists.
Read more about this topic: Ghost Slug
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)