Morpho-ecological study of freshwater mollusks of margalla foothills, Pakistan

Abstract

For a long time, freshwater snails have attracted the attention of biologists. The ecological attributes like diversity, species richness and equitability of freshwater gastropods are important due to various reasons like intermediate hosts for many trematodes and bio-indicator. Snails are cosmopolitan in distribution and diversity of habitat to perform ecological performance is abosolute. The freshwater malacological information is sparse within Pakistan specifically in the foothills of Margalla hills. Therefore, the present study was designed to evaluate the habitat preference of freshwater snails to environmental factors. However, only 3 species of snail were found from the 13 sites of Islamabad during the period of study. The presence of the snails like Melanoides tuberculata, Indoplanorbis exustus and Gyraulus convexiusculus belonging to Family Planorbidae and Family Thiaridae. Freshwater snail samples were collected from Islamabad and Rawalpindi in screw capped sterilized bottles from various localities during the months of July 2017 to December 2017. Physical parameters affect the presence of snails e.g. alkalinity of the soil indicates the survival of more number of species. A significant correlation was found between diversity and equitability (Pearson correlation value=0.961, p-value=0.00). Higher the electrical conductivity of soil lower is the diversity of snail. A significant correlation was found between diversity and equitability (Pearson correlation value=0.961, p-value=0.00). Electrical conductivity and pH showed a significant correlation (Pearson correlation value=0.665; p=0.015). The saturation in soil was significantly correlated to calcium in the soil (Pearson correlation value=0.640; p=0.025). The study indicated that the freshwater snails of twin cities need such type of investigations, so urban benthic macrofauna may be well understood in-terms of ecology, phylogenetic analysis, spatio-temporal variation and diversity.