Summary A member of the genus Pellioditis Dougherty, 1953 (syn. Phasmarhabditis Andrássy, 1976) was detected in three introduced gastropod species in Moscow for the first time. Both the nematode and its gastropod hosts were found to have originated from the Caucasus region. No native gastropod species as well as the alien invasive slug Arion vulgaris were infected by P. akhaldaba. The Moscow strain of P. akhaldaba is very close to P. akhaldaba from Georgia in the ITS rDNA (7 bp difference) but they differ significantly in the sequences of COI mtDNA (50 bp difference). However, phylogenetic analysis of both loci showed that these two strains were the closest relative to all other species and strains of the genus Pellioditis studied.
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