A new species of Pila (Gastropoda: Ampullariidae) from Mizoram, India

ABSTRACT

Family Ampullariidae consists of 11 genera of freshwater snails distributed pan-tropically in the Old and the New World. One of the ampullarid genera, Pila, is distributed in Africa and Asia and consists of 28 species. Here we describe the sixth member of the genus Pila from India. Pila mizoramensis n. sp. was collected from the Northeast Indian state of Mizoram. We adopted an integrative taxonomic approach to describe this species. First, a multilocus phylogeny of the genus was built to determine its placement in the tree. Then we used pairwise distance in the cytochrome oxidase I gene to compare its divergence from its congeners. Finally morphometric data was used to show that this hill stream species of Pila does not overlap with other hill stream species in morphometric space. The morphology of the species is also discussed in detail. With the advent of molecular tools in taxonomy a plethora of new species have been described from India in the last few decades. We add this newest member of genus Pila to the growing list.ZooBank registration: http://www.zoobank.org/urn:urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:0ED40557-4595-49E5-99A6-8A684C5D6AB3

KEYWORDS:

• Endemic
• gastropod
• hill stream
• hotspot
• integrative taxonomy
• NE India
• species discovery

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Drs R. Ganesan and Karthick Balasubramanian for help during the field work and Ms Poorna Bhat for developing distribution maps. The authors would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for the critical comments on the earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank the Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India [BT/01/17/NE/TAX] and Institute of Bioresource and Sustainable Development, Imphal, Manipur for funding. Part of the work was also supported by DST-SERB grant [EMR/2017/001213] to Praveen Karanth. We are grateful to Mizoram Forest Department for permits [File No. A. 33011/4/2017-CWLW/V0I-III/224]. Part of the fieldwork was funded by Rufford Small Grant for Nature Conservation To MS (19805-1).