Distribution
Geomalacus maculosus has what is known as a disjunct distribution (in other words, it occurs in discontinuous locations). It is found only in southwestern Ireland, north-west Spain, and from central Portugal to northern Portugal. The presence of this slug in southwest Ireland seems anomalous, but a similar occurrence has been observed in a few other species of animals and plants; this type of disjunct distribution (in Iberia and in Ireland without any intermediate localities) is known as "Lusitanian". It is possible that genetic research will throw light more light on the Kerry slug in the context of the postglacial colonisation of Ireland. There has been speculation that the slug was introduced from Iberia by prehistoric humans, as appears to have happened in the case of the Eurasian Pygmy Shrew.
Read more about this topic: Kerry Slug
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“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 (18561950)
“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 (18031882)
“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 (18221893)