An ontogenetic perspective on the evolution of shell size and shell shape in the land snail genus Plectostoma

Institute Biology Leiden, Leiden Univerisity, Leiden, The Netherlands
Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, The Netherlands
Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1
Subject Areas
Biodiversity, Developmental Biology, Evolutionary Studies, Zoology
Keywords
3D morphometrics, Opisthostoma, Borneo, Limestone hills
Copyright
© 2014 Liew et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Liew T, Schilthuizen M. 2014. An ontogenetic perspective on the evolution of shell size and shell shape in the land snail genus Plectostoma. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e420v1

Abstract

The rampant convergent and parallel evolution in shell form in the Gastropoda is well known. Many studies focus on the functional drivers which have been regarded as a major force in shell evolution. There is, however, a scarcity in studies that aim at understanding shell form evolution with respect to their ontogeny. Hence, we investigated the evolution of shell form in the micro-landsnail genus Plectostoma (Diplommatinidae) from the viewpoint of shell ontogeny. We examined the aperture ontogeny profiles that describe how aperture form and growth trajectory change along the shell ontogeny, and how the aperture ontogeny profiles relate to the observed shell forms. We also estimated the phylogeny of Plectostoma species, and examined patterns of character evolution for shell form. Our study revealed a general issue in the characterisation of shell shape and demonstrated how shell shape differences can be expressed as differences in the ontogeny of morphospace. It is clear that in Plectostoma the phylogenetic history does not prevent the course of shell ontogeny, and the resultant form. Finally, each species has a unique aperture ontogeny profile that determines its shell shape while retaining a conserved developmental program that maintains shell size.

Author Comment

This manuscript is a Chapter from a PhD thesis of Liew Thor-Seng from Leiden University. https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/26115. More data and analysis are being collected and the manuscript will be updated.

Supplemental Information

Supplementary File 1

R scripts and data.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-1

Supplementary File 2

Sequence data for 21 Plectostoma species and 4 outgroup taxa in nexus format for MrBayes analysis.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-2

Supplementary File 3

Character matrix.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-3

Supplementary File 4

Aperture ontogeny profiles for 11 Plectostoma species raw data.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-4

Supplementary File 5

Aperture ontogeny profiles for 11 Plectostoma species, in which each was labelled by respective shell shape.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-5

Supplementary File 6

Phylogenetic tree inferred by maximum likelihood analysis

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-6

Supplementary File 7

Ancestral state reconstructions for shell shape and size, and rib form, as derived by the maximum parsimony method.

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.420v1/supp-7