A team of scientists led by Dr Wen-Lung Wu of the Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center in Taipei has described a new species of land snail from Taiwan.
Aegista diversifamilia. Image credit: Huang C et al.
The new species, named Aegista diversifamilia, is endemic to Taiwan and currently known from I-Lan and Hualian Counties.
It belongs to a genus of air-breathing land snails in the family Bradybaenidae.
Aegista diversifamilia is a medium-sized snail with a shell ranging in height from 0.97 to 1.68 cm and width 1.98–3.24 cm.
The shell is thin but solid, glossy with chestnut brown or yellowish-brown, usually with narrow and light brown spiral band on periphery.
Eggs are white and round, about 3 mm in diameter with 20–30 eggs in each spawn.
Live snails are generally found on the ground or under leaf litter in shady, moist environments in lowland hardwood forests.
For many years Aegista diversifamilia was confused with Aegista subchinensis, a species widely distributed in Taiwan.
In 2003, Dr Wu and his colleagues noticed that there was morphological divergence between the western and eastern populations of Aegista subchinensis separated by the Central Mountain Range, a major biogeographic barrier in Taiwan. They suggested that a cryptic species might be within Aegista subchinensis.
Based on morphological and molecular analysis, they confirmed that what was thought to be Aegista subchinensis from eastern Taiwan is, in fact, a new species.
“Aegista diversifamilia and A. subchinensis are also geographically separated by the Lanyang River, which makes this the first report suggesting that the Lanyang River is a biogeographic barrier for lowland terrestrial animals,” said the scientists, who described the new species in the journal ZooKeys.
_____
Huang C et al. 2014. Taxonomic revision of Aegista subchinensis (Möllendorff, 1884) (Stylommatophora, Bradybaenidae) and a description of a new species of Aegista from eastern Taiwan based on multilocus phylogeny and comparative morphology. ZooKeys 445: 31-55; doi: 10.3897/zookeys.445.7778
