Indoplanorbis is a genus of air-breathing freshwater snail. They are aquatic animal pulmonate gastropod mollusk in the sheep's horn snails family Bulinidae. The only extant species is widely distributed across the tropics and serves as an important intermediate host for several trematode parasites.
Taxonomy
The genus
Indoplanorbis has one extant and one extinct fossil species. It has a long history and wide geographical range, and is thought to have still additional species.
research revealed the phylogenetic depth of divergences between the Indian clades and Southeast Asian clades, and together with habitat and parasitological differences suggests that
Indoplanorbis may comprise more than one extant species.
The most phylogenetically related genus to Indoplanorbis is genus Bulinus.
Biogeography
Meier-Brook (1984)
adopted an African (
) origin for
Indoplanorbis with rafting to Asia since the
Cretaceous on the northward migrating
Indian craton; this author also considered a Europe to Southwest Asia tract or an Africa to South India dispersal.
Morgan et al. (2002)
[.] attributed the occurrence of
Indoplanorbis in India to colonization (from Africa) via the Middle East land connection.
Clearly the two different dispersal mechanisms imply very different chronologies; the Gondwanan vicariance hypothesis implies that proto-
Indoplanorbis has been present in India since the late Eocene (35 Ma; India: Asia collision), whereas dispersal via
the
Sinai-Levant suggests a Plio-
Pleistocene arrival.
The results by Liu et al. (2010) indicated a radiation beginning in the late Miocene with a divergence of an ancestral bulinine lineage into
Assam and peninsular India clades.
A Southeast Asian clade diverged from the peninsular India clade late-Pliocene; this clade then radiated at a much more rapid pace to colonize all of the sampled range of
Indoplanorbis in the mid-Pleistocene.
Distribution
The present range is across Iran,
Nepal,
India, Sri Lanka,
Southeast Asia (for example Thailand),
central Asia (Afghanistan),
[ Alan Solem (1979) "Some mollusks from Afghanistan". Fieldiana Zoology new series 1: 1-89. cited pages 11-12.] Arabia and Africa.
The genus is also found in the Middle East (Oman[Brown D. S. (1994). Freshwater snails of Africa and their medical importance. London: Taylor & Francis. 207- 208.][.] In contrast to Asia, the well documented appearance of the snail in Africa (e.g., Nigeria[, abstract.] and Ivory Coast
This article incorporates CC-BY-2.0 text from the reference.[.]
External links
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Baker F. C. (1945). The molluscan family Planorbidae. The University of Illinois Press, Urbana. 196-201.
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Raut S. K. (1986). "Disease transmitting snails. II. Population studies of Indoplanorbis exustus Deshayes." First year PRS Thesis in Science, University of Calcutta.
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