"Nationalnyckeln till Sveriges flora och fauna" is a work in progress, published by Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet (SLU), i.e. the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. The original ambition was to describe all (!) species of living organisms found in Sweden in about 100 volumes, published over a period of 20 years. 16 years into the project, only 20 volumes have been published, and something tells me we will never see the happy ending of this particular project! Still, the books produced so far *are* interesting, at least if you´re some kind of super-nerd with a strong tendency to favor invertebrates, mosses or fish. I´m pretty sure volume CV is the only encyclopedic treatment of the Psocoptera *with full color photos* available on the market, to take just one example.
The latest installment in this potentially never-ending series arrived earlier today at my COVID-restricted pick up location somewhere in Sweden. Yes, it´s volume DN 110-167, titled "Blötdjur. Sidopalpssnäckor - taggsäckssnäckor. Mollusca: Cimidae - Asperspinidae". Yes, folks, it´s time to give the small subsection of the nerd community who specialize in molluscan cladistics their due! This volume covers Heterobranchia ("the different gilled-snails"), more specifically the infraclasses Lower Heterobranchia and Euthyneura, minus the superorders Pylopulmonata, Eupulmonata and Hygrophila, to be covered in another volume at some unspecified later date. In plain English, most "standard" snails and slugs (the ones you eat, the ones that eat your vegetables, etc) have been excluded from this work, which concentrates almost exclusively on marine species, many of them positively bizarre.
The authors make a valiant attempt to sort out the cladistically correct relationships between the taxa described in the book, and an even more daring attempt to describe the often quite strange anatomy and behavior of these "sea slugs and sea snails". I´m not sure if they really succeed. What was that again about "secondary detorsion" and "internal symmetry", or whatever it was? And what on earth is a "protandric hermaphrodite"? Yes, it means that an organism is born a male and later in life switches biological sex and becomes female. It also seems that many of these Mollusca have the "wrong" body plans altogether, which I suppose keep evolutionary biologists and geneticists up all night, scratching their heads. (Creationists have a ready answer: God did it to confound the non-believers! Why he created the protandric hermaphrodites is, alas, less clear.)
The most bizarre creature in the entire volume is Elysia viridis, a sea slug with the ability to photosynthesize sun light! The authors even refer to it as a "plantimal", a term I assume is derived from science fiction. Through a process known as kleptoplasty, Elysia incorporates chloroplasts from green algae it consumes into its own cells, thereby becoming "solar-powered" like a plant. Since chloroplasts could be considered cyanobacteria, the relationship is a kind of "symbiosis". Here we have a true Otherkin, it seems!
Compared to this, the capture of cnidarian nematocysts (stinging cells) by the Nudibranchia is almost trivial...
The species presentations contain information on morphology, behavior and ecology (if known), and range. There is also some information on the scientific names. No English summaries seem to exist, but the keys are bilingual. Most species are illustrated by color pics of their soft bodies and/or shells. Vernacular Swedish names, many of them weird, seems to have been invented by the authors and approved by the mysterious committee regulating such things. Trust me, we don´t know what on earth "klubbnuding", "dubbelvårting" or "Y-tecknad snigelkott" is supposed to mean (well, maybe barely)!
This will hardly be a best seller, but if heterobranchs is your main thing in life, investing in a copy might be a good idea. At least if you understand Swedish.
And perhaps even if you don´t.
No comments:
Post a Comment