Wallace's line

American  

noun

Zoogeography.

1. an imaginary line that separates the Oriental and Australian zoogeographical regions and passes between Bali and Lombok, west of Sulawesi, and east of the Philippines.

---

Wallace's line British  

noun

1. the hypothetical boundary between the Oriental and Australasian zoogeographical regions, which runs between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok, through the Macassar Strait, and SE of the Philippines

---

Etymology

Origin of Wallace's line

First recorded in 1865–70; after A. R. Wallace

Example Sentences

One species – the Malayan box turtle Cuora amboinensis – occurs in Sulawesi and the Moluccas, putting it on the Australasian side of Wallace’s Line.

From Scientific American

In the film, Anderson quotes David Foster Wallace’s line: “Every love story is a ghost story.”

From Salon

Note that a modern sea crossing from Borneo to Sulawesi – this involves crossing the fabled Wallace’s Line – would mean swimming across the 200 km of the Makassar Strait.

From Scientific American

“Wallace’s line” dividing the Indo-Malayan and Austro-Malayan sub-regions is frequently transgressed in the range of Malayan insects.

From Project Gutenberg

The channel between Bali and Lombok lies squarely on Wallace's Line, the famous geographic divide named after the nineteenth-century British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace who, along with Charles Darwin, codiscovered natural selection.

From Scientific American