CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Pomacea canaliculata is a freshwater snail belonging to the family Ampullariidae, a taxon that includes Asian, African and American species collectively known as apple snails, and is the most widely studied snail in Argentina, being the object of different morphological, anatomical, ecological, embryological and taxonomical studies. Although early recognized, the wide conchological variation of P. canaliculata has been seldom quantitatively analyzed. The aims of our study are to describe and analyze the variation and the origin of P. canaliculata shell traits, and to compare them with the information available for other Neotropical Ampullariids, focusing mainly on quantitative or experimental studies. The shell of P. canaliculata has been described as globose to subglobose, with a low spire and an oval aperture; the color of the shell is brown-green, showing several dark spiral bands of variable width and transverse growth; the operculum is corneous with concentric growth lines around an excentric nucleus. Most of these traits, and many others, show a great influence of ontogenetic, sexual, genetic and ecophenotypic components, which give place to an important intra- and interpopulation variation. In spite of the fact that many aspects of the conchological variation have been already studied, the available information includes, in most cases, only one or a few populations from a restricted geographical region. The knowledge is even more limited for other species of Pomacea or other genera of apple snails, preventing the development of a comparative approach in conchological aspects at generic and familiar levels. The great conchological variation in P. canaliculata has been considered a serious hindrance to the study of several aspects of its biology. However, this apparently chaotic variation can be split in several biologically meaningful components, becoming an interesting subject of research on its own merit.

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