Our objective is to evaluate the habitat preference of freshwater snails in relation to environmental factors and the presence of the competitor snail Melanoides tuberculatus. In the first phase, snails was collected at 12 sites. This sampling sites presented a degree of organic input. In the second phase 33 sampling sites were chosen, covering a variety of lotic and lentic environments. The sn...

Wetland ecosystems act as natural freshwater purification systems, but their rich biodiversity is being threatened with the introduction of non-native snail, Pomacea canaliculata. This study was conducted to measure herbivory effects and growth rate P. canaliculata on common macrophytes: Ipomoea aquatica, batatas, Pandanus amaryllifolius Cucurma longa. In separate experiments, macrophyte specie...

Understanding the outcomes of host-parasite interactions in nature is in high demand as parasites and pathogens are important for several ecological and evolutionary processes. Ecological immunology (ecoimmunology) has a key role in reaching this goal because immune defence is the main physiological barrier against infections. To date, ecoimmunological studies largely lean on measuring constitu...

The resting membrane potential of the pacemaker neurons is one of the essential mechanisms underlying rhythm generation. In this study, we described the biophysical properties of an uncharacterized channel (U-type channel) and investigated the role of the channel in the rhythmic activity of a respiratory pacemaker neuron and the respiratory behaviour in adult freshwater snail Lymnaea stagnalis....

Hypothesis: Sexual host populations rapidly evolve specific resistance against parasites, and consequently diverge from populations under relaxed parasite-mediated selection or selection imposed by different parasite populations. Organisms: The freshwater snail, Potamopyrgus antipodarum, and two different populations of a naturally prevalent sterilizing trematode, Microphallus sp. Methods: Expe...

Freshwater snails belonging to the Ampullariidae family show noteworthy anatomical, physiological and ecological characteristics (Berthold, 1991), which have captivated scientific interest since long ago. However, few field studies have focussed on apple snail population dynamics (Burky, 1974; Lum Kong and Kenny, 1989). International concern about the Argentinean apple snail Pomacea canaliculat...

Cercarial dermatitis (swimmer's itch) is caused by the penetration of human skin by cercariae of schistosome parasites that develop in and are released from snail hosts. Cercarial dermatitis is frequently acquired in freshwater habitats, and less commonly in marine or estuarine waters. To investigate reports of a dermatitis outbreak in San Francisco Bay, California, we surveyed local snails for...

Water hardness is a property depending on the presence of alkaline earth metals, mainly calcium and magnesium. Among the strategies for water quality monitoring, ecotoxicological assays are performed to minimize impacts and classify water bodies. For these laboratory evaluations parameters are previously defined in the guidelines, including water hardness for both cultivation and testing medium...

The freshwater snail, Bithynia tentaculata (Gastropoda: Prosobranchia), is frequently found in gravel pits and its role in the transmission of larval digeneans was assessed in one of these unstable water bodies from the Lower Thames Valley (UK) from June 1982 to December 1984. Eight species of cercarial and five species of metacercarial infections were reported from B. tentaculata, with up to 7...

15 Gregory, T.R. (2003) Genome size estimates for two important freshwater molluscs, the zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) and the schistosomiasis vector snail (Biomphalaria glabrata).Genome46, 841–844 16 Goldman, M.A. et al. (1984) Chromosomal evolution in planorbid snails of the genera Bulinus and Biomphalaria. Malacologia 25, 427–446 17 Knight, M. et al. (1998) Expressed sequence tags (EST...