Glossoscolecidae Michaelsen, 1900

Misirlioğlu, Mete, Reynolds, John Warren, Stojanović, Mirjana, Trakić, Tanja, Sekulić, Jovana, James, Samuel W., Csuzdi, Csaba, Decaëns, Thibaud, Lapied, Emmanuel, Phillips, Helen R. P., Cameron, Erin K. & Brown, George G., 2023, Earthworms (Clitellata, Megadrili) of the world: an updated checklist of valid species and families, with notes on their distribution, Zootaxa 5255 (1), pp. 417-438 : 424

Glossoscolecidae Michaelsen, 1900

In its more restricted sense, after the splitting up of the Rhinodrilidae by James (2012), the Glossoscolecidae family is distributed mainly in continental Central and South America from Panama to Northern Argentina and Uruguay. The first species described from Latin America belongs to this family, Glossoscolex giganteus Leuckart , a large earthworm from Southeastern Brazil. In fact, the genus contains a relatively large proportion of large-bodied (> 30 cm long) species (18 out of 58 known species; Feijoo & Brown 2023). So far, native species are known in the Caribbean Islands only from Guadeloupe ( James & Gamiette 2016), but they may likely occur on other islands. The family includes six genera ( Enantiodrilus, Fimoscolex, Glossodrilus , Glossoscolex, Holoscolex , and Righiodrilus ) and 156 species (plus 9 subspecies). One widespread species, Enantiodrilus borellii Cognetti (with which both Diaguita species, D. vivianae Righi and D. michaelseni Cordero were synonymized by Moreno et al. 2005) may constitute a potentially invasive species in the tropics, considering its distribution from Argentina to Venezuela ( Fragoso & Brown 2007). As the family occurs in a region with high endemicity ( Lavelle & Lapied 2003), there is a large potential to find many new species and possibly genera, with further sampling efforts, particularly in the Andean region and Northern South America, but also in the Atlantic Forest region of Southeastern Brazil (Silva et al. 2017).