Illustrations for a book on the Invertebrates of Macquarie Island

Because the artist worked faster than anticipated, more drawings were able to be completed than planned. From the Summary of the referenced book: Subantarctic Macquarie Island, lying nearly 1500km south-south-east of Tasmania, is uniformly cool, wet and windy. Its isolation means both the flora and fauna are depauperate in species and disjunct in composition.

However, the invertebrate fauna is relatively well studied compared to other areas of Australia of similar size. In this book, I summarise the biological information available on the terrestrial and fresh water invertebrates that reside there, and provide illustrated keys to identify many of the species. Altogether there are over 350 terrestrial, fresh and brackish water species recorded from the island but a few are not residents.

Of the permanent residents, approximately 12% are considered endemic and 25% are cosmopolitan in distribution. A number of transient, synanthropic and species of unknown status are known. Insects are in a minority with only 20 native resident species while the most diverse taxon is the Acarina (mites) with nearly 120 species.

An approximately equal number of species have affinities with faunas of New Zealand and its cool temperate islands (10%) to the northeast or with subantarctic islands to the west (11%) but the highest number of species are of unknown distribution as they have not yet been described (30%). The remainder are varied in origin. Copies of the illustrations and the book are available for download at the provided URLs.