Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Keywords

Biodiversity, ecology, field collecting, slime molds, southern high latitudes

Abstract

An expedition to subantarctic Macquarie Island was carried out during the period of late January to early May of 1995 with the objective of documenting myxomycete biodiversity. Collecting on the island yielded 412 field collections, with another 14 collections were obtained with the use of the moist chamber culture technique. A total of twenty-six species representing 13 genera was recorded. This is the largest set of data yet available on the myxomycetes associated with any high-latitude area of the Southern Hemisphere. Prior to the expedition, only a single species was known from Macquarie Island. The purpose of this paper is to describe this expedition from the viewpoint of the author.

Plain Language Summary

In 1995, a scientific expedition to the remote subantarctic Macquarie Island set out to discover its slime molds (myxomycetes). Before this trip, only a single species was known from the island. The researchers were incredibly successful, making hundreds of collections and ultimately identifying 26 different species. This dramatically increased the known biodiversity for the region. This paper provides a firsthand account of that groundbreaking expedition, which created the largest-ever dataset of slime molds for any high-latitude location in the Southern Hemisphere, turning a biological blank spot on the map into a documented ecosystem.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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