Poratia digitata (Porat, 1889)
Status:
GB IUCN status: Not applicable (non-native)
ID Difficulty
Identification
A small pale brown millipede (to 4mm in length) with body covered in tubercles and very similar in appearance to Prosopodesmus panporus (which also occurs inside heated glasshouses).
A description of this species, with figures, is provided by Blower & Rundle (1986).
Distribution and Habitat
This species was first collected from peat in the Tropical Fern House at Kew in 1985 and was then found under bark and in soil in the Orchid House at Leicester Museum Botanic Gardens later the same year (Blower & Rundle, 1986). It has been collected at Kew on a number of occasions over the last 20 years but there were no other records until 2005 when it was found in Durham University Botanic Gardens (Lee, 2005b) and in a tropical butterfly house near Sheffield (Lee, 2005a). Recently it has been recorded also from Wales and Scotland (NBG Wales & RBG Edinburgh respectively; Gregory & Lugg, 2020).
It has also been found in botanic gardens in Denmark, Switzerland and Germany and in a greenhouse in Sweden (Blower & Rundle, 1986). This species appears to be native to tropical South America and the Caribbean.
This updated species account is based on Lee (2006).
Links
MilliBase - Global catalogue of Millipedes: https://millibase.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=946556
BRC code
54
idBmigTaxa
Mil_243