Rüdiger Bieler

• DSc
• Curator, Invertebrates at Field Museum of Natural History

To re-evaluate the relationships of the major bivalve lineages, we amassed detailed morpho-anatomical, ultrastructural and molecular sequence data for a targeted selection of exemplar bivalves spanning the phylogenetic diversity of the class. We included molecular data for 103 bivalve species (up to five markers) and also analysed a subset of taxa...

Our 2007 book publication "Seashells of Southern Florida-Bivalves" reported on 379 nominal extant bivalve species in the Florida Keys. Bivalve research has remained an active field and this taxonomic update addresses 196 of these nominal species, many of which have undergone generic reallocations, synonymies, or reidentifications. A list of additio...

The marine amathinid gastropod Cyclothyca pacei is anatomically described and compared to existing data for Indo-Pacific Amathina tricarinata, based on samples collected from marine bivalves in the Florida Keys, USA. Its overall bauplan exhibits expected features of ectoparasitism and limpetization, which in this heterobranch species have led in pa...

Juan Fernández and Desventuradas are two oceanic archipelagos located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean far off the Chilean coast that received protected status as marine parks in 2016. Remoteness and access difficulty contributed to historically poor biodiversity sampling and limited associated research. This is particularly noticeable for bivalve...

Vermetid worm-snails are sessile and irregularly coiled marine mollusks common in warmer nearshore and coral reef environments that are subject to high predation pressures by fish. Often cryptic, some have evolved sturdy shells or long columellar muscles allowing quick withdrawal into better protected parts of the shell tube, and most have variousl...

Based on morphological examination of rock-, shell-, and coral-boring bivalves in the marine genus Botula, Wilson and Tait (1984) concluded that this genus comprised a single Recent species, Botula fusca (Gmelin, 1791), with a pan-tropical distribution spanning the western Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Variation in shell colour, habitat, de...

Laternula elliptica (P. P. King, 1832) is the sole representative of the anomalodesmatan family Laternulidae and the largest bivalve in the Antarctic and Subantarctic. A keystone species of the regional benthic communities, it has reached model status, having been studied in hundreds of scientific works across many biological disciplines. In contra...

Donacidae is a commercially important family of heterodont bivalves and one of the few bivalve lineages that has successfully colonised brackish and fresh waters. However, to date, no phylogenetic hypothesis exists for this widely distributed group. Here we turn to molecular data from the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes and combine these with the...

We introduce a new method of estimating accepted species diversity by adapting mark-recapture methods to comparisons of taxonomic databases. A taxonomic database should become more complete over time, so the error bar on an estimate of its completeness and the known diversity of the taxon it treats will decrease. Independent databases can be correl...

Analyses of evolutionary dynamics depend on how phylogenetic data are time-scaled. Most analyses of extant taxa assume a purely bifurcating model, where nodes are calibrated using the daughter lineage with the older first occurrence in the fossil record. This contrasts with budding, where nodes are calibrated using the younger first occurrence. Her...

‘Miniaturization’ is a widespread phenomenon among the Metazoa. In the molluscan class Bivalvia, records of miniaturization are numerous. Among the Archiheterodonta, Warrana besnardi (Klappenbach, 1963) has attracted attention for its tiny size, which does not exceed 1.5 mm in shell length, and because it belongs to a group with limited anatomical...

The American conchologist Isaac Lea had a long and productive career during which he introduced more than 1,800 names of molluscan species between 1827 and 1874, the majority North American land and freshwater species. His idiosyncratic way of publishing, by describing new taxa multiple times in duplicated and variously modified journal papers as w...

The anthropogenic transfer of non-indigenous marine species (NIMS) into new areas of the oceans is a key issue. Despite increasing research effort in recent years many fundamental questions remain to be answered before we can effectively manage the issue. One question is whether the greater number of NIMS thus far documented in temperate waters is...

Eight species of Architectonicidae have been reported for lower Miocene deposits in continental Chile. One of these species is Architectonica karsteni, which had an inferred geographic range, for this epoch, extending from Costa Rica to central Chile (~8° N to 34° S), and even in the Caribbean. There is no evidence of the current presence of the fa...

Background: Photosymbiotic associations between metazoan hosts and photosynthetic dinoflagellates are crucial to the trophic and structural integrity of many marine ecosystems, including coral reefs. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to study the short-term ecological interactions between coral hosts and their symbionts, longterm evoluti...

Sperm ultrastructure is described for the ocean quahog Arctica islandica (Linnaeus, 1767) (Arcticidae), a long-lived, and commercially and phylogenetically important marine bivalve from the North Atlantic, and for Neotrapezium sublaevigatum (Lamarck, 1819), an Indo-Pacific member of the only other family of Arcticoidea (Trapezidae). Spermatozoa of...

Background Photosymbiotic associations between metazoan hosts and photosynthetic dinoflagellates are crucial to the trophic and structural integrity of many marine ecosystems, including coral reefs. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to study the short-term ecological interactions between coral hosts and their symbionts, long-term evoluti...

Background Photosymbiotic associations between metazoan hosts and photosynthetic dinoflagellates are crucial to the trophic and structural integrity of many marine ecosystems, including coral reefs. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to study the short-term ecological interactions between coral hosts and their symbionts, long-term evoluti...

Members of the small bivalve family Cyrenoididae inhabit brackish waters of the eastern and western Atlantic Ocean. Cyrenoida floridana (Dall, 1896) from the western Atlantic is poorly known aside from shell descriptions. A detailed shell and anatomical study of C. floridana is here presented and compared with available data for Cyrenidae and Glauc...

Background Photosymbiotic associations between metazoan hosts and photosynthetic dinoflagellates are crucial to the trophic and structural integrity of many marine ecosystems, including coral reefs. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to study the short-term ecological interactions between coral hosts and their symbionts, long-term evoluti...

Background: Photosymbiotic associations between metazoan hosts and photosynthetic dinoflagellates are crucial to the trophic and structural integrity of many marine ecosystems, including coral reefs. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to study the short-term ecological interactions between coral hosts and their symbionts, long-term evolut...

Our world is in the midst of unprecedented change—climate shifts and sustained, widespread habitat degradation have led to dramatic declines in biodiversity rivaling historical extinction events. At the same time, new approaches to publishing and integrating previously disconnected data resources promise to help provide the evidence needed for more...

The drivers of latitudinal differences in the phylogenetic and ecological composition of communities are increasingly studied and understood, but still little is known about the factors underlying morphological differences. High-resolution, three-dimensional morphological data collected using computerized micro-tomography (micro-CT) allows comprehe...

CABI Invasive Species Compendium: Chama macerophylla is a common epifaunal chamid bivalve native to the western Atlantic (the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the southern east coast of the United States). This species and several others of the same genus readily settle on artificial substrata including ship hulls and have high invasive potential...

We are in the midst of unprecedented change—climate shifts and sustained, widespread habitat degradation have led to dramatic declines in biodiversity rivaling historical extinction events. At the same time, new approaches to publishing and integrating previously disconnected data resources promise to help provide the evidence needed for more effic...

Shell aperture modifications are well known in terrestrial and aquatic gastropods, with apertural lip thickening and tooth development common in species with terminal (determinate) shell growth. In contrast, secondary shell openings are rare in snails and are largely limited to slit shells, keyhole limpets, and abalone of the Vetigastropoda. When s...

Bivalvia has been the subject of extensive recent phylogenetic work to attempt resolving either the backbone of the bivalve tree using transcriptomic data, or the tips using morpho-anatomical data and up to five genetic markers. Yet the first approach lacked decisive taxon sampling and the second failed to resolve many interfamilial relationships,...

The 2017 annual meeting of the American Malacological Society (AMS) was preceded by an iDigBio/National Science Foundation supported workshop on digitizing mollusk specimen data in non-federal Natural History Collections in the USA and Canada. The AMS President's Symposium invited mollusk researchers, curators and collection managers, who are creat...

In 2017, a minimum of 8.5 million mollusk lots representing some 100 million specimens were held by 86 natural history collections in the U.S. (81) and Canada (5). Of these, 6.2 million lots representing 70 million specimens were cataloged (73%), another 2.3 million lots were considered quality backlog awaiting cataloguing, and 4.5 million lots (53...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research and foster innovation. LifeWatch ERIC has developed various virtual research environments, which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering high computational capacity and comprehensive collaborative platforms that supp...

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research and foster innovation. LifeWatch ERIC has developed various virtual research environments, which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering high computational capacity and comprehensive collaborative platforms that supp...

Architectonicidae (“sundials”) is a family of subtropical to tropical marine gastropods, known to be capable of long-range larval dispersal. At least 14 species of the genera Architectonica, Granosolarium, Heliacus, Pseudomalaxis, Psilaxis, Solatisonax, and Spirolaxis are known from the Hawaiian Islands. In this work, we report the discovery of two...

Robert Robertson (1934−2018) was systematic malacologist, natural historian, and reproductive biologist, focusing on marine gastropods and based at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (ANSP) for most of his career. An account of his professional life is presented, based in part on a brief autobiography here included. Lists of his 142 pu...

Orbituary

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by the scientific community to conduct research and foster innovation. LifeWatch ERIC has developed various virtual research environments, which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering high computational capacity and comprehensive collaborative platforms that supp...

The presence of Architectonicidae off the coasts of Chile has been recorded from the Miocene, but currently only one living species is reported for Chilean waters, and that species is present at Easter Island, located ~3700 km from continental Chile. One of the species present during the Miocene was Architectonica karsteni, whose geographic range e...

Sperm ultrastructure of nine species of protobranch bivalves, representing three of four extant orders (Solemyida, Nuculida, Nuculanida), is discussed. Greatest diversity occurs in Solemyida (acrosomal vesicle low-conical, tall-conical, or very elongate, with radial plates; nucleus rod-shaped, teardrop-shaped, or very elongate; four, five, or six m...

A new species of vermetid gastropod belonging to the genus Novastoa Finlay, 1926, N. rapaitiensis sp. nov., is described from French Polynesia and the Great Barrier Reef, based on morpho-anatomical and molecular data, increasing the recognized extant diversity of this genus from five to six species. The new species is characterized by the largest o...

Artificial reefs created by deliberately sinking ships off the coast of the Florida Keys island chain are providing new habitat for marine invertebrates. This newly developing fouling community includes the previously reported invasive orange tube coral Tubastraea coccinea and the non-native giant foam oyster Hyotissa hyotis. New SCUBA-based survey...

The systematics of the molluscan class Bivalvia are explored using a 5-gene Sanger-based approach including the largest taxon sampling to date, encompassing 219 ingroup species spanning 93 (or 82%) of the 113 currently accepted bivalve families. This study was designed to populate the bivalve Tree of Life at the family level and to place many gener...

Mussels (Mytilida) are a group of bivalveswith ancient origins and some of the most important commercial shellfish worldwide. Mytilida consists of approximately 400 species found in various littoral and deep-sea environments, and are part of the higher clade Pteriomorphia, but their exact position within the group has been unstable. The multiple ad...

Spermatogenic ultrastructure in the marine bivalve mollusc Myochama anomioides (Myochamidae) is described and contrasted with other bivalves, especially other euheterodonts. Small (0.1 μm diameter), primary proacrosomal vesicles produced in spermatocytes give rise to much larger (0.4 μm diameter) secondary proacrosomal vesicles in early spermatids,...

To broaden the anatomical knowledge of marine bivalves, detailed gross anatomical studies of 20 species from the Florida Keys are presented, representing 19 families: (Cardiidae) and Scissula similis (J. Sowerby, 1806) (Tellinidae). These taxa represent various clades of the class Bivalvia and interface with broader regional and phylogenetic studie...

Sperm ultrastructural features of the honeycomb (foam) oysters Hyotissa hyotis, H. sinensis, and H. mcgintyi (Gryphaeidae) are described and compared with other Ostreoidea and more generally with other pteriomorphian Bivalvia. Spermatozoa of H. sinensis and H. mcgintyi (the type species of Parahyotissa Harry 1985) exhibit (1) a broad, low-conical a...

Bivalves are an ancient and ubiquitous group of aquatic invertebrates with an estimated 10 000–20 000 living species. They are economically significant as a human food source, and ecologically important given their biomass and effects on communities. Their phylogenetic relationships have been studied for decades, and their unparalleled fossil recor...

The family Omalogyridae comprises some of the smallest known marine snails. Like all micromolluscs, they have been historically neglected and are underrepresented in faunistic surveys. Based on a few focused studies of the family, 15 valid omalogyrid species were previously recognised in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. To these, we add 3 new species...

MolluscaBase, which will be a Global Species Database covering all marine, freshwater and terrestrial molluscs, recent and fossil, was launched on February 6-7, 2014 at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) at Ostende, host institute of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). Currently, the WoRMS database contains more than 44,000 valid, verif...

The Mollusca, second largest phylum on Earth, lack a global listing of valid names or even precise figures for the number of Recent species. The launching of MolluscaBase is intended to fill this gap, expanding the contents of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) to include all marine, freshwater and terrestrial molluscs, recent and fossil....

Identifying natural groups within the caenogastropod family Vermetidae has proven challenging. The sessile lifestyle of vermetids, with associated xenomorphically distorted, overgrown and corroded shells, has resulted in a long and confused taxonomic history based primarily on adult shell characters. In this study, we use morphological, anatomical...

Bivalves share many of the “deeper” questions with the other molluscan groups – issues such as their origin and sister-group relationships within the Mollusca, and their suitability to explore molecular data in a “known” fossil framework. Other questions are more specific to bivalves, a group that radiated so successfully and nowadays predominantly...

The Museum Godeffroy (1861–1885), a private natural history museum in Hamburg (Germany) founded by the merchant John Cesar VI Godeffroy, functioned as a research and public display museum, as well as a natural history specimen dealership. Large collections of zoological, botanical, ethnographic, and anthropological specimens were obtained by compan...

Revived interest in molluscan phylogeny has resulted in a torrent of molecular sequence data from phylogenetic, mitogenomic, and phylogenomic studies. Despite recent progress, basal relationships of the class Bivalvia remain contentious, owing to conflicting morphological and molecular hypotheses. Marked incongruity of phylogenetic signal in datase...

The taxonomy of the uncoiling "worm-snails" belonging to the marine gastropod families Vermetidae, Siliquariidae and Turritellidae is notoriously confused and their nominal species frequently mixed (in the literature as well as in type specimen collections) with members of superficially similar tube-building polychaete worms or members of unrelated...

Figure S3. Inferred tRNA secondary structures based on the nucleotide sequences of 22 mitochondrial tRNA genes identified from the complete mt genome of Eualetes tulipa. tRNA genes are labeled according to their amino acid specificity and are arranged alphabetically.

Figure S5. Inferred tRNA secondary structures based on the nucleotide sequences of eight mitochondrial tRNA genes identified from the partial mt genome of Thylaeodus sp. tRNA genes are labeled according to their amino acid specificity and are arranged alphabetically.

Figure S1. Inferred tRNA secondary structures based on the nucleotide sequences of 22 mitochondrial tRNA genes identified from the complete mt genome of Dendropoma maximum. tRNA genes are labeled according to their amino acid specificity and are arranged alphabetically.

Figure S2. Inferred tRNA secondary structures based on the nucleotide sequences of 23 mitochondrial tRNA genes identified from the complete mt genome of Dendropoma gregarium. tRNA genes are labeled according to their amino acid specificity and are arranged alphabetically.

Figure S6. Inferred tRNA secondary structures based on the nucleotide sequences of five mitochondrial tRNA genes identified from the partial mt genome of Vermetus erectus. tRNA genes are labeled according to their amino acid specificity and are arranged alphabetically.

Table S2. The conservation of amino acid identity in select codons from cox1, cox2, and cox3 genes from the mt genomes of Dendropoma maximum, D. gregarium, Eualetes tulipa, and Thylacodes squamigerus.

Figure S4. Inferred tRNA secondary structures based on the nucleotide sequences of 24 mitochondrial tRNA genes identified from the complete mt genome of Thylacodes squamigerus. tRNA genes are labeled according to the amino acid specificity and are arranged alphabetically.

Table S1. Base compositions and nucleotide skews for new vermetid mt genomes, existing caenogastropod mt genomes, and other select molluscs.

Table S3. Summary of codon usage across all protein-encoding genes in the mitochondrial genomes of Dendropoma maximum, D. gregarium, Eualetes tulipa, and Thylacodes squamigerus.

Widespread sampling of vertebrates, which comprise the majority of published animal mitochondrial genomes, has led to the view that mitochondrial gene rearrangements are relatively rare, and that gene orders are typically stable across major taxonomic groups. In contrast, more limited sampling within the Phylum Mollusca has revealed an unusually hi...

Some 1,048 names at the rank of subtribe, tribe, subfamily, family and superfamily have been proposed for Recent and fossil bivalves. All names are listed in a nomenclator giving full bibliographical reference, date of publication, type genus, and their nomenclatural availability and validity under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature....

Isognomon alatus is a sessile intertidal bivalve species that attaches to hard substrata. Within the Florida Keys, where tidal ranges are usually less than 1 m, settlement sites only a few centimetres apart experience drastically different tidal microhabitats. These varying conditions may create morphological gradients that can complicate taxonomic...

Sperm ultrastructure in the marine bivalve order Anomalodesmata is considered in the light of new information for Australian Myochama anomioides and Cuspidaria latesulcata . In M. anomioides , the acrosomal complex lies posterior to the nucleus, in contact with the asymmetrical midpiece mitochondria – an unusual configuration reported from most of...

A survey of venerid bivalves of the Gulf of Thailand revealed 78 species belonging to 10 of the 14 recognised subfamilies. Included in this survey were 25 species collected during a field workshop held near Chantaburi in the northern Gulf of Thailand during August–September 2005; all species are known previously from that location. Fifteen species...