Tasmanian Thipsels

A research blog

This blog is a companion to my Tasmanian Millipedes website. It reports the work I'm doing on some tiny native millipedes that don't get much coverage in TM, where they're mainly packed into a single "taxonomic work in progress" page.

I'm writing this as a work-in-progress blog, which means I can't predict how often I'll post. Between "regularly" and "occasionally", I expect! To get alerts for new posts, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Comments welcome as emails to mesibov@datafix.com.au, but I'll moderate.

Readers may be wondering why I'm not publishing taxonomic papers on these thipsels, as I've done with many tiny Polydesmida from Tasmania and other parts of Australia (e.g. from alpine Victoria in 2025).

The reason is that taxonomic study takes weeks or months to do properly, and in 2023 the two Tasmanian museums stopped loaning specimens to specialists who aren't working on institutional premises. Nearly all Tasmanian thipsel specimens are in those two museums. I can't borrow any of those specimens for study in my home lab, and I live a long way from any museum. What I can do instead is

That's the work I'll be reporting on this website.

2026-07-01     What's a "thipsel"?
2026-07-02     A Victorian genus in the NW
2026-07-04     The iNaturalist problem
2026-07-07     M4 and M76
2026-07-08     Not M4 - whoops
2026-07-09     A new thipsel from the NW
2026-07-15     M50 and the thipsel gap