We here describe a new genus of unusually bluish-green acochlidiid to date known only from a single locality on the island of Ambon, Indonesia.

Acochlidiidae are thus of special interest for evolutionary biology and ecology. Where known, the species of this unique group are specialized predators of other amphidromous snails’ egg capsules (Neritidae) and their reproductive biology and adaptations to life in freshwater are complex. While several clades of snails inhabit freshwater systems, slugs are extremely rare in freshwater: only the centimeter-sized Acochlidiidae, with currently three genera, contain more than one species and live in the lower reaches of island streams in an area comprising Eastern Indonesia, Fiji, and Palau. Gastropods (slugs and snails) are prominent and species-rich faunal elements in marine and terrestrial habitats of the tropics.

In their absence, we discuss several hypotheses to explain the disjunct occurrence of the new species. The Cenomanian species precedes the evolution of waterfowl, which are today considered a main vector for long-distance dispersal. The finding of a freshwater snail on the Burma Terrane, back then an island situated at some 1500 km from mainland Asia, has implications for the dispersal mechanisms of Mesozoic lymnaeids. Its inclusion in terrestrial amber is probably a result of the amphibious lifestyle typical of modern representatives of the genus. belongs in the family Lymnaeidae, today a diverse and near globally distributed family. Here we describe the first freshwater snail ever preserved in amber. In contrast to the large amount and great diversity of terrestrial species retrieved so far, aquatic biota constitute rare inclusions. Substantial reduction of this wood flux likely negatively affects coastal and marine environments.īurmese amber continues to provide unique insights into the terrestrial biota inhabiting tropical equatorial forests during mid-Cretaceous time. This represents an upper bound for contemporary wood fluxes to the oceans because of wood removal from rivers and reservoirs and a lower bound for historical wood fluxes because of deforestation and river engineering.

We estimate that 4.7 million m3 of large wood could enter the oceans each year (the 95% prediction interval range is ~300,000 to 70 million m3). Here, we use contemporary records of wood flux to reservoirs and coastal regions to estimate the magnitude of potential contemporary global wood fluxes. Centuries of deforestation, flow regulation, and channel engineering have substantially reduced riverine large wood fluxes to the oceans. Sunken wood sustains seafloor communities. Floating driftwood supports open-ocean organisms. Driftwood alters coastal sediment dynamics and provides food and habitat for diverse organisms. Rivers historically transported unquantified volumes of driftwood to the ocean.

Fresh water drift wood huge log