Back to Laevistrombus …

It’s April, and we’re on to Blog 4. Progress is ever-onward, and I can’t believe how quickly the time is flying! Continuing with the current theme of marine gastropods, I’m going to continue with the story of Laevistrombus, discussing a paper that Stephen published in 2017. Yes, I know, I haven’t said anything about his masters thesis yet. All in good time!

Laevistrombus canarium (Maxwell et al. 2019)

Sex-ratio bias is common in gastropods, particularly in the Strombidae, with generally 0.75 males per female. In addition, this sex imbalance is variable on both spatial and temporal scales. Currently, the mechanisms driving sex-ratio bias are little explored. Therefore, in this paper, published in Memoirs of the Queensland Museum - Nature, we explored some of these mechanisms in Laevistrombus canarium (Fig. 1) from two populations.

Four Mile Beach and Alexandra Reefs (Google Maps; 14/04/2019)

We sampled individuals from two reefs in Far North Queensland, Australia, with different benthic compositions, namely Four Mile Beach and Alexandra Reef (Fig. 2). Snails were sampled over nine trips at low tide between June 2013 and May 2016. We collected individuals from bot mating and non-mating clusters when possible. For each individual, we recorded the substrate it occurred on and its sex.

We also found a strong bias towards females, which was consistent across both locations and across benthic substrates (Table 1). Our findings suggest that inherent genetic factors (possibly related to either ZQ-ZZ or XX-XY sex determination mechanisms) regulate natural patterns of sex imbalance in L. canarium. These findings also suggest that some life-history characteristics, yet to be clearly established, are associated with the origin and maintenance of this sex-ratio bias in L. canarium.

* Taken from Maxwell et al. 2017

Again, I hope that you realise that marine snails provide a really rich area for scientific scrutiny. And who knows how much more we will learn in the future. Perhaps the most important lesson that I take out of this paper is not a specific conclusion, or anything that is going to shatter the core of scientific thinking. I suggest that we shouldn’t just assume that patterns will be the same across closely related species. I suggest that we should explore with an open mind, and not just generalise that a snail will behave like any other snail. We really should admire these species, and indeed populations and even individuals within species, for what they are: unique.

You can read more about my research in my publications, listed on my blog. You can also find me on ResearchGate, the James Cook University website and Twitter.