Last year, I tallied up all my myriapod collecting from 2021 and now it’s time to take a look back at 2022’s collecting! This was my first full year of having my homemade Berlese funnels up and running, and I was excited to see how the species I collected would change from season to season. For each Berlese sample, I typically left the litter in for 5-7 days with an 8-hour light/16-hour dark cycle (I didn’t want to leave the lights on when I was not at home). I also removed the top layer of dried out litter every few days and replaced it with moist litter that hadn’t been cycled through yet, mixing up the litter as I added in the new batch.
In May, I added cheesecloth on top of the wire mesh in my Berleses, based on this video from Dr. Mike Caterino showing how he sets up his litter samples. He does it to keep the final alcohol sample cleaner, and based on my samples before and after adding the cheesecloth, I agree with him that it works. It’s much nicer to sort through a sample that doesn’t have a lot of extra soil and leaves in it. I ripped some holes in my cheese cloth to allow bigger arthropods through, and that worked fine for me.
In addition to collecting leaf litter for Berlese funnels, I did a fair amount of hand collecting with my garden claw and with an aspirator. (For a nice overview of how an aspirator works, the late Dr. Simon Leather wrote a nice blog post about it in 2014. Typically, they’re used for insects, but I’ve found them to work well for collecting Lithobiomorpha stone centipedes.) I usually hand collected specimens from leaf litter for about an hour or so, then I’d use my litter sifter to gather a leaf litter sample. Sometimes I’d flip a log or two and check under some loose bark, but mainly I was targeting the litter. It meant that I missed some decaying wood specialists (such as Bothropolys multidentatus, a stone centipede found almost exclusively under logs and bark), but that’s okay.
Collecting Localities
I traveled more this year, mostly within Virginia, and racked up 62 collecting events. That’s an average of about five per month, not too shabby! It’s down slightly from last year, when I had 68 collecting events. Still, a fine pace that ensured I didn’t go more than a few weeks without traipsing around the woods.
The map below shows my collecting localities, which were spread between 4 states: Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. I had the opportunity to expand my collecting in southwest Virginia, where I found a few unexpected species, and I made it out to the swamps of southeast Virginia as well. I’m a huge fan of swamps, and found some great species out there (more on that later).
Map of Virginia and surrounding states with 2022 collection localities indicated by purple dots.
Myriapods Collected
All of that travel made for an excellent year of myriapod collecting, as shown on the below graph. The blue bars represent the number of specimens I collected and is plotted on the left axis, and the black line represents the number of collecting events, plotted on the right axis. Both are grouped by month. I collected a total of 1,924 myriapods in 2022, and I collected the most specimens during April and September. Those are great times to be out collecting because the seasons are changing, which means you can nab the last vestiges of the previous season and the opening salvo of the next. Plus, during one of my April collections, I collected a few gallons of ramps from an absolute sea of them that spread over the forest floor.
Bar graph showing how many myriapods I collected each month (blue bars) and how many collecting events occurred each month (black line)
After identifying all 1,924 specimens, I had collected 88 species from 30 families in 2022. On average, I collected about 25 species per month (unique and repeat species included). In the graph below, you can see how many species I found each month. My three best months were July, September, and March. July’s high total surprised me, since it’s pretty dry by that time, but I traveled quite a bit in July and was able to take extra litter samples. July was also the month with my highest number of collecting events (10!), which explains how I picked up so many extra species then.
Bar graph showing how many species I collected each month
After seeing my monthly collections and species counts, I wondered which myriapods were my standouts. Which species did I see all the time, and which did I rarely see? The (somewhat unruly) graph below answers that question, with interesting results.
The first nine species account for 52% of my collected specimens, and they’re all centipedes and symphylans. Stone centipedes (Lithobiids) made a strong showing, representing 4 of the top 9 and 30% of my total collected specimens. This is partly because they’re common in litter habitats, and partly because I focused on collecting stone centipedes during many of my collecting trips. Here are the top 9 most abundant myriapods I collected in 2022, with number of specimens in parentheses after their names:
Nadabius pullus (195), Nampabius sp 1 (189), Hanseniella sp (180), Paitobius zinus (119), Cryptops leucopodus (67), Symphylella sp (65), Sozibius sp (64), Strigamia branneri (59), Arctogeophilus umbraticus (58)
The first species on my list, Nadabius pullus, is utterly unsurprising. It’s likely the most common centipede in Virginia, and is common throughout the rest of the eastern US as well. Nampabius sp 1 is a tiny Lithobiid clocking in at 4 mm long that is locally abundant, and I’ve found it in other parts of central and western Virginia. The taxonomy of the genus is….rough, so I haven’t taken it to species yet. The first symphylan on my list, Hanseniella, is a tiny critter that’s very easy to collect with a Berlese funnel. Symphylans typically need to be slide mounted for species ID, so I’ve left this one at genus for now. The rest of my Top 9 list are also common species for western Virginia, with many of them also being found throughout the eastern US. Strigamia branneri can be difficult to separate from S. chionophila, but has dark dorsal diamond-shaped markings in life. These rapidly fade in alcohol, however. In the specimens I’ve collected with my Berlese funnel, I’ve noticed those markings can fade in as little as 12 hours.
Collage of some of the most common myriapods I collected in 2022. Clockwise from top left: Nadabius pullus (Lithobiidae), Hanseniella sp. (Scutigerellidae), Paitobius zinus (Lithobiidae), Strigamia branneri (Linotaeniidae).
At the other end of the spectrum, I collected 33 species that were represented by only one or two specimens. The standouts from this group were Boraria stricta (Xystodesmidae), Theatops spinicaudus (Plutoniumidae), Pachymerium ferrugineum (Geophilidae), and Cleidogona fidelitor (Cleidogonidae). I was elated to collect B. stricta and T. spinicaudus at the same locality in southwest Virginia. Both these species are more common in the southern Appalachians and just barely make it up into Virginia by following the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I hadn’t encountered T. spinicaudus at all before—my heart skipped a beat when I figured out what it was. The more common species is Theatops posticus, whose range encompasses a wide swath of the continent from east Texas to Massachusetts. Another new-to-me centipede was Pachymerium ferrugineum, an introduced species from Europe and Asia that I had only seen illustrations of previously. The forcipules are quite distinct and are shown in the image below. I found my specimen in a swampy trash dump next to a road.
Boraria stricta (Xystodesmidae) and Pachymerium ferrugineum (Geophilidae)
And now we come to Cleidogona fidelitor, possibly my most unexpected find of the year.
Side view of Cleidogona fidelitor (Cleidogonidae). The scale in the background is in millimeters.
It’s slightly over a centimeter long and looks like any other Cleidogona species, which is why you need to dissect out the gonopods to identify all Cleidogona species. I collected this species at a nearby locality that I’ve continually visited for the last four years, and where I’ve collected three other species: C. caesioannulata, C. fustis, and C. major, with C. fustis being the most common species I find. During 2021 and 2022, I was doing pretty regular collecting there, and figured that those three species were the only ones I would find. But then, two months ago, I found one specimen of C. fidelitor out of nowhere! It’s a new county record, and a nice range extension: the species is only known from two other sites, one in Augusta County and one in Bedford County, both in Virginia. My record is from the Ridge and Valley of Virginia, and the first outside of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So, it goes to show you that even when you think you’ve found all the species at a site, take a few more samples, just in case.
Comparisons between 2021 and 2022
During 2022, I collected with a Berlese funnel for the entire year, while in 2021, I only used a Berlese funnel for about four months. How did incorporating this new collecting technique for an entire year change my collecting results? Keep in mind that I accumulated 62 collecting events in 2022 and 68 collecting events in 2021, so my collecting effort was about the same. I define a collecting event as any event in which I collect a specimen at a locality, which can range from finding a house centipede in a building to a four hour collecting bonanza in a forest. Both years had about the same number of low effort and high effort collecting events, but I definitely traveled to more places in 2022.
Specimen Count
I collected a total of 1,924 myriapods in 2022, almost double the 1,009 specimens I collected in 2021. Using my Berlese funnels for the entire year definitely made a difference. The funnels are much more efficient than just hand collecting, and it’s less of a time investment on a per-specimen basis. The table below breaks down how many specimens I collected each month: 2021 is represented by the black bars and 2022 is represented by the blue bars.
My monthly specimen counts for 2022 were higher than 2021 during every single month except for October and December, again demonstrating the usefulness of the Berlese funnels. My Berlese funnel usage in 2021 began in September, and the last four months of the year are really the only times my 2021 collecting gets close to my 2022 levels.
Species Count
I collected 88 species from 30 families in 2022, while in 2021, I collected 86 species from 32 families. Basically, I collected about the same diversity in both years. The major differences in which species I collected each year stemmed from the travel opportunities I had, during which I could collect uncommon or rare species. Another difference derived from finding different introduced species. I don’t normally focus on disturbed habitats, which harbor more introduced species, but those types of habitats do often have species I wouldn’t collect otherwise.
So my species count in a typical year seems to hover around the high 80s. Maybe in 2023 I’ll break 100 species: my Myriapod Big Year.
Final Highlights
That’s my year in numbers. The big picture is that if you’re after arthropods that live in the leaf litter, incorporate a Berlese funnel into your collecting routine! It’s a huge return on your investment, Berlese funnels are cheap to make, and they don’t add too much extra time to your collecting activities. You definitely spend more time processing samples later, but if you’re pressed for time, you can simply save everything as a bulk sample and process it later. In the future I’d like to incorporate some pitfall traps and subterranean traps as well, but for now, the Berlese funnel is the simplest trap for me to incorporate into my routine.
Now, for some final highlights from my field trips last year. These are some miscellaneous finds, not all myriapod-focused.
I had my best collecting year ever for Scolopocryptops peregrinator (pictured above), a smaller, pale yellow Scolopocryptops that seems to favor more fossorial habitats than the more common S. nigridius and S. sexspinosus. I found a few under logs, and while it’s been speculated to be more active during cold weather (I collected a few specimens in February and November), I unearthed a couple from the leaf litter in July and August. It’s a strange centipede that I’d love to find more of. The individual in the above photo is about 23 mm long and is probably a juvenile. I collected one adult, which was 31 mm long.
I have it on the good authority of Dr. Ray Fisher that the mite in the above photo is the coolest mite I’ve ever collected for him—and I’ve collected some good mites for Ray! It’s in the family Trombellidae, apparently a very rare family. I was jazzed to have found something so neat, and a day later, another one came out of the Berlese! So keep your eyes peeled for these weird-looking mites, and contact Ray if you catch one.
I came across this peculiar fungus three weeks after hearing about it for the first time—Wynnea americana, the moose antlers or rabbit ears mushroom. A superb name! The “ears” can reach five inches in length: these ones were probably around three or four inches high. I’m definitely going to be on the lookout for this species in the future; there’s always some cool new mushrooms to see out there. I found this batch on a mountain in Smyth County, Virginia during early August.
And finally, I want to highlight a few professional accomplishments from 2022. I published the first chapter of my dissertation in the journal Zookeys: https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/73485/. In the paper, my coauthors and I described 17 new species in the cherry millipede genus Nannaria, including one species named for my wife, and another named after Taylor Swift. The news spread far: outlets including CNN, NPR, and even Rolling Stone ran stories about the new millipedes! This research is a continuation of our previous work on the twisted-claw millipedes and the cherry millipede family as a whole. In the past five years, we’ve described over 60 new species in the family, with many of the species being from the Appalachian Mountains, adding to the importance of the region for millipede conservation.
After publishing our new millipede species, I went on a few podcasts to talk about them. If you’re interested in learning more, give them a listen! I accomplished a years-long dream of mine by talking to Alie Ward on Ologies, in what may be the best interview I’ve ever given. I was also on the New Species podcast to dive deeper into the taxonomy of the twisted-claw millipedes, and I spoke with Inside Appalachia about the importance of millipedes in the region. I’ve been listening to Inside Appalachia for about a decade at this point, so it was a thrill for me to talk with them for my segment.
I also had the opportunity to give a keynote talk at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences BugFest in September (the dot near Raleigh on my collecting map!). It was the biggest insect festival I’ve ever been to and was a ton of fun. While I was there, I filmed an episode of Ant Lab with Dr. Adrian Smith about millipedes, which you can watch here. It was a blast, and we found some great millipedes out in the field!
Selfie during the filming of my AntLab episode, featuring (left to right): Marian Hennen, Megan McCuller, Jean, Dr. Adrian Smith, Dr. Bronwyn Williams, Dr. Derek Hennen.
I hope you enjoyed this (longer than expected) summary of my 2022 collecting! If you have any burning myriapod questions, feel free to reach out.