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Early records of rotifers from Australian fresh waters were made by visiting collectors. V. Gunson Thorpe, for example, a surgeon on a visiting Royal Navy ship, collected in the ponds of the Acclimatisation Society in Brisbane (Thorpe 1887). Australian records appeared in the Supplement to the monograph by Hudson & Gosse (1889). For almost a century, only patchy records by visiting- or local collectors appeared. Their findings were summarized in a checklist of 279 rotifer taxa identified from Australia (Shiel & Koste 1979).Subsequently, a >20 year collaboration by the latter two authors has added ca. 400 taxa to the Rotifera recorded from a wide range of habitats across mainland Australia, Tasmania and the Bass Strait Islands. Most of these are widely distributed or cosmopolitan species, but a small proportion (10-15%) appear to be more restricted endemic to Australia, or localized in Southeast Asia, Papua-New Guinea or New Zealand, and are more correctly described as Australasian in distribution (e.g. Segers & De Meester 1994; Shiel & Green 1998).
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