Comparative Karyotypes of Two Land Snails, Euhadra subnimbosa and Euhadra dixoni (Bradybaenidae, Gastropoda)

Abstract

Japanese land snails have been classified into about 800 species by Azuma (1982). The chromosome numbers of these animals were studied by Inaba (1945, 1959) and Kawabe (1947), based on the classical method with gonadal tissues. They reported the haploid chromosome numbers in 24 species from n=28 to n=29. Babrakzai and Miller (1975), Babrakzai et al. (1974, 1980) and Reeder and Miller (1974) analyzed the karyotypes of land snails collected from Arizona with the hypotonic squash method. Prasad and Das (1978) first introduced the air-drying technique for the land snail chromosome utilizing their ovo-testes. For the chromosome examination of land snails we had used the chromosome technique reported by Imai et al. (1977) and obtained satisfactory results. Thus our methods were able to get more well-spread metaphase cells than the routine air-drying methods, and the karyotype of two Japanese land snails, E. subnimbosa and E. dixoni, were studied first. © 1984, The Japan Academy. All rights reserved.