Shell morphological characters and allozyme electrophoresis were used to study the relationships among six geographical populations of land snails collected from Peninsular Malaysia. Allozyme electrophoresis was used to study the genetic variations to complement the morphological features studied that included shell lengths, numbers of whorls and shell colour. Ten loci coding for six enzymes (MDH, LAP, ALP, PGM, G6PDH and EST) could be reliably scored in samples from the six populations studied. The dendrogram showed two major clusters with one cluster comprising Subulinidae populations from Perak, Selangor, Johor, Terengganu and Pahang while the other cluster included only the Streptaxidae Huttonella bicolor (red) population. The Subulinidae populations were grouped into two subclusters: one subcluster included the Subulina sp. populations from Perak, Selangor an Johor while the other subcluster included the Opeas sp. populations from Terengganu and Pahang. Morphological features can identify the different families and therefore they can complement the allozyme genetic studies on the land snail populations. Like other reports in the literature, our results also underline the importance of a genetic approach in conjunction with a morphological approach, for discriminating land snail species. The present results suggest that small land snails, which were similar in colour but different in sizes, were not of the same family/genus.
We examined allozyme variation in two camaenid tree snails, Amphidromus atricallosus and A. inversus, across two principal regions of Thailand and from Singapore, plus for A. inversus, one site in peninsular Malaysia. Using horizontal starch gel electrophoresis, 13 allozyme loci (11 polymorphic) were screened for A. atricallosus and 18 (5 polymorphic) for A. inversus. Heterozygosity was higher in A. atricallosus (Hexp=0.018-0.201, mean=0.085) than in A. inversus (Hexp=0-0.023, mean= 0.002). Genetic heterogeneity among samples was higher in A. inversus (Fst=0.965) than in A. atricallosus (Fst=0.781). Within A. atricallosus, populations were more differentiated in southern Thailand (Fst=0.551) than in eastern Thailand (Fst=0.144). The high Fst and low Hexp in populations of A. inversus suggest that this species is likely to have experienced a series of strong bottlenecks, perhaps occurring chiefly on offshore continental-shelf islands. The low Fst values of A. atricallosus in eastern Thailand suggest frequent gene flows among populations in this region. The southern and eastern samples of A. atricallosus exhibited fixed allele differences at four loci and great genetic distance (Nei's D=0.485-0.946), suggesting that these two samples may actually represent, or else be evolving into, separate species.