The Asian mantleslug Meghimatium pictum is an exotic species introduced to Brazil in the late 1990s, but only formally reported in 2011. Since then, it has been deemed an agricultural pest and given the status of an invasive species; furthermore, it has been confirmed as an intermediate host for the nematode Angiostrongylus costaricensis in Brazil. Despite its potential for impacts, no additional studies on the status of its invasion have been conducted since the initial report.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe superfamily Orthalicoidea comprises approximately 2,000 species of terrestrial gastropods, mostly concentrated in the Neotropics but also present in southern Africa and Oceania. We provide a multi-marker molecular phylogeny of this superfamily, reassessing its family- and genus-level classification. We exclude two families from the group, Odontostomidae and Vidaliellidae, transferring them to Rhytidoidea based on their phylogenetic relationships as recovered herein.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is broad recognition by practicing taxonomists that the field is going through a crisis, which has been dubbed the "taxonomic impediment". There are many aspects involved in said crisis, but publication practices in taxonomy are often neglected or relegated to the backseat. We provide an initial foray into this topic via a worldwide survey with taxonomists, spanning all botanical and zoological groups, and career stages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough terrestrial gastropods are remarkably diverse, our knowledge of them is still lacking, especially for species from the Global South. As such, new tools to help researchers collect data on these organisms are very welcome. With this in mind, we investigated Brazilian observations on iNaturalist to assess the feasibility of the data available on the platform as a basis for studies on the tropical terrestrial gastropod fauna.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMacrocypraea mammoth is a new species from Trindade, a remote oceanic island located 1160 km off Espírito Santo, Brazil. This isolated species is described in a detailed morphological scenario that includes all Recent congeneric species. The detailed anatomy of two Recent species, M.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe deep-water mollusks collected during the Marion Dufresne (MD55) expedition to the southeastern Brazilian coast in 1987 have been studied in several recent works. The present paper lists and diagnoses 19 species belonging to the vetigastropod families Calliostomatidae, Colloniidae, Margaritidae, and Solariellidae. A new species, Calliostoma valkuri sp.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConstruction of water diversions is a common response to the increasing demands for freshwater, often resulting in benefits to communities but with the risk of multiple environmental, economic, and social impacts. Water-diversion projects can favor massive introductions and accelerate biotic homogenization. This study provides empirical evidence on the consequences of a proposed law intended to divert water from two large and historically isolated river basins in Brazil: Tocantins to São Francisco.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the present study, Calliostoma melliferum sp. nov. is described from Canopus Bank, a seamount located ~190 km off Fortaleza, Ceará, northeastern Brazil, at depths of 60-260 m.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArchitectonicidae is a diverse family of heterobranch sea snails comprising over 11 genera and 140 extant species distributed worldwide (Bieler & Petit, 2005). They live in shallow to deep water, and have turbinate to discoidal shells, with a typically wide umbilicus and a downward-pointing (heterostrophic) protoconch (Healy, 1998). Pseudotorinia phorcysi Cavallari, Salvador & Simone, 2013 is a deep-water species known only from its type locality in the SW Atlantic, off Cabo Frio, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil (23°41'S 42°06'W, 430-450 m depth).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSolariellidae is a diverse family of small (5-20 mm) marine snails of worldwide distribution. They usually live on fine sediment to unconsolidated substrates in deep-waters of extra-tropical to tropical latitudes (Hickman 1998; Williams et al. 2013).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Brazilian archaeological shellmounds, many species of land snails are found abundantly distributed throughout the occupational layers, forming a contextualized set of samples within the sites and offering a potential alternative to the use of charcoal for radiocarbon dating analyses. In order to confirm the effectiveness of this alternative, one needs to prove that the mollusk shells reflect the atmospheric carbon isotopic concentration in the same way charcoal does. In this study, 18 terrestrial mollusk shells with known collection dates from 1948 to 2004 AD, around the nuclear bombs period, were radiocarbon dated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present work deals with the vetigastropods of the family Seguenziidae collected by the Marion Dufresne (MD55) expedition in SE Brazil, reporting the occurrence of eight species. The following species have their geographical range extended: Ancistrobasis costulata, Carenzia carinata, Carenzia trispinosa, Hadroconus altus, Seguenzia elegans and Seguenzia formosa. Two new species, Halystina umberlee sp.
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