Within taxonomic groups, most species are restricted in their geographic range sizes, with only a few being widespread. The possibility that species-level selection on range sizes contributes to the characteristic form of such species-range size distributions has previously been raised. This would require that closely related species have similar range sizes, an indication of "heritability" of ...

Two syntypes of the mid-east Queensland charopid, Helix iuloidea Forbes, 1852, presumed to be mis-placed, were located by author in mollusc collections Natural History Museum, London. These specimens had been mistakenly catalogued under name juloidea. The historical use H. juloidea 19th and early 20th century malacological literature is detailed possible origin this invalid proposed. A lectotyp...

Background a 36-year-old woman, with a history of childhood asthma allergic to house dust mites, noticed one year prior to her arrival at our unit an episode of generalized itching, dyspnea, severe rhinoconjunctivitis and abdominal pain after eating rice with razor shell. After that, she had tolerated rice alone. Razor shell (Ensis ensis) is a common mollusc, which has an elongated fragile and ...

UNLABELLED We have developed two programs that speed up common bioinformatic applications by spreading them across a UNIX cluster.(1) BLAST.pm, a new module for the 'MOLLUSC' package. (2) WRAPID, a simple tool for parallelizing large numbers of small instances of programs such as BLAST, FASTA and CLUSTALW. AVAILABILITY The packages were developed in Perl on a 20-node Linux cluster and are pro...

This Special Issue of Geo-Marine Letters compiles papers on marine, estuarine and freshwater mollusc shells as recorders of environmental and climatic conditions. Considering that many past studies have differentiated geochemical investigations from sclerochronological investigations, we propose that the sub-discipline term “sclerochemistry” be used when geochemical investigations are undertake...

MacMunn (1886) extracted a porphyrin from the integument of the starfish Asterias rubens-then known as Uraster rubens-and he considered that this and similar pigments which he had obtained from the slug Arion empiricorum and the coelenterates Flabellum variabile and Fungia symmetrica were identical with the haematoporphyrin of Hoppe-Seyler (1871), which was then the only porphyrin known. Dhere ...

We report the characterisation of a Brachyury ortholog (PvuBra) in the marine gastropod Patella vulgata. In this mollusc, the embryo displays an equal cleavage pattern until the 32-cell stage. There, an inductive event takes place that sets up the bilateral symmetry, by specifying one of the four initially equipotent vegetal macromeres as the posterior pole of all subsequent morphogenesis. This...

An epidemiological study on dicrocoeliosis caused by Dicrocoelium dendriticum was carried out on sheep, molluscs and ants in the mountains of León province (NW Spain) between 1987-1991. The results concerning the intermediate hosts and a review of some aspects of dicrocoeliosis are summarized. Mollusc collection for the helminthological study was random throughout the study area at fortnightly ...

Local studies have shown that the distribution of red knots Calidris canutus across intertidal mudflats is consistent with the predictions of an ideal distribution, but not a free distribution. Here, we scale up the study of feeding distributions to their entire wintering area in western Europe. Densities of red knots were compared among seven wintering sites in The Netherlands, UK and France, ...

The mechanism of adaptation of haemoglobin from the Antarctic mollusc Yoldia eightsi to its low-temperature environment is a decrease in the oxygen affinity via an increased ligand-dissociation rate. At 2 degrees C this haemoglobin has an oxygen affinity similar to other haemoglobins at 25 degrees C. At 25 degrees C, Yoldia haemoglobin shows a low oxygen affinity, resembling that of human deoxy...