Abstract
The golden mussel (Limnoperna fortunei) and Corbicula fluminea are considered well-established invasive species in the rivers of Brazil and South America. In addition to the environmental problems resulting from this invasion process, the economic issue, especially in hydroelectric dams, is very worrisome and has mobilized several types of studies on these invasive bivalves. The detection and identification of these organisms in their adult phase in the rivers is not a problem; however, the identification of bivalve larvae by usual morphological methods is difficult due to high similarity conserved in these stages. The use of PCR-RFLP has proven to be an efficient and agile molecular method that allowed the detection of different patterns in the agarose gel for the two bivalves tested. The gel pattern showed a 100 bp band for L. fortunei not detected for C. fluminea. Thus, it is possible to detect larvae of these species from water samples, which can be a powerful tool for environmental monitoring programs on aquatic invasive species.
Highlights
Limnoperna fortunei (Dunker, 1857), or golden mussel, is a bivalve native to the Southeast of Asia
The observed pattern was the same for all replicates (L. fortunei, n = 14; C. fluminea, n = 11), which shows that the PCR-RFLP protocol described here can be applied for discrimination between invasive bivalve species
The results found for L. fortunei (n = 15) samples, which were collected at 2000 km to the North, and for C. fluminea (n = 13), collected at 780 km to the East of the original collection points, were identical, indicating that this method can be applied in other regions of Brazil
Summary
Limnoperna fortunei (Dunker, 1857), or golden mussel, is a bivalve native to the Southeast of Asia. The most-accepted hypothesis is that it entered along the coast of Argentina through ships’ ballast water (Darrigran, 1995) with the first record in the Rio de la Plata/Argentina (Pastorino et al, 1993). Nowadays it is found in several regions of South America (Darrigran and Mansur 2006). Another freshwater invasive bivalve is the Corbicula fluminea (Muller, 1774), or Asian clam, a Southeast Asia native species, which had its first American record in the USA by (Burch 1944 apud Mansur and Garces, 1988). VeitenheimerMendes (1981) recorded for the first time the presence of C. fluminea in Brazil, and since several works showed its dispersion in the South (Mansur and Garces, 1988), Southeast (Avelar, 1999), Central-West (Callil and Mansur, 2002) and North (Beasley et al, 2003) regions of the country
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