Abstract
To assess the effect of anthropogenic activities on ecosystems, it is of prime importance to develop new tools enabling a rapid characterization of ecological communities. Freshwater ecosystems are particularly impacted and threatened by human activities and need thorough attention to preserve their biodiversity and the ecological services they provide. Studying such ecosystems is generally difficult because the associated organisms are hard to sample and to monitor. We present a ready-to-use environmental metabarcoding protocol to characterize and monitor the freshwater gastropods communities from water samples. The efficiency of this new tool was compared to a classical malacological survey at 19 sampled sites from 10 distinct rivers distributed over Corsica Island (France). From a single water sample, our eDNA monitoring tool provided a faithful characterization of the local malacofauna compared to the results obtained from the classical malacological survey, with 97.1% of species detection confirmed by both methods. The present tool successfully detected the 11 freshwater snail species previously reported in Corsica by malacological survey but was limited at the genus level for some species. Moreover, our malacological survey allowed an update of the local distribution of a wide diversity of freshwater snails including invasive species (i.e. Potamopyrgus antipodarum and Physa acuta) as well as snail hosts of pathogens of medical and veterinary importance (i.e. Bulinus truncatus and Galba truncatula). These results strengthened a previous hypothesis of an eventual competitive interaction between B. truncatus and P. antipodarum that could limit the endemization of the uro-genital bilharziasis in Corsica.
Highlights
Anthropogenic activities contribute to habitat fragmentation (Strayer and Dudgeon, 2010) or pollution (Blettler et al, 2018) that have adverse effects on ecosystems (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003), including an important decrease of biodiversity (Waldron et al, 2017)
Our semi-quantitative approach showed that P. antipodarum and A. fluviatilis were the most abundant species with 48.03 ± 46.38 and 26.68 ± 40.53 individuals, respectively (Table 1)
The relationship between environmental DNA (eDNA) and species abundance is subjected to unexplained variations (Yates et al, 2020) mainly because eDNA is heterogeneously released in the environment (Jo et al, 2019) and DNA persistence depend on several environmental biotic and/or abiotic factors (Barnes et al, 2014; Taberlet et al, 2018). In view of these results, the eDNA monitoring using metabarcoding approaches appears useful for biomonitoring studies
Summary
Anthropogenic activities contribute to habitat fragmentation (Strayer and Dudgeon, 2010) or pollution (Blettler et al, 2018) that have adverse effects on ecosystems (Parmesan and Yohe, 2003), including an important decrease of biodiversity (Waldron et al, 2017). According to the IUCN Red list, 46% of these ecosystems worldwide are endangered or vulnerable (Janssen et al, 2016) These ecosystems host 10% of all known species despite representing only 0.8% of the Earth’s surface (Balian et al, 2008; Strayer and Dudgeon, 2010). Gastropods have received particular attention for several reasons They are suffering massive extinction notably due to habitat loss/degradation, the introduction of alien species and, in some cases, overexploitation (Bouchet et al, 1999; Johnson et al, 2013; Lydeard et al, 2004; Strong et al, 2007).
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