Locomotor responses to salt stress in native and invasive mud-tidal
gastropod populations (Batillaria)
Abstract
Plasticity in salt tolerance can be crucial for successful biological
invasions of novel habitats by marine gastropods. The intertidal snail
Batillaria attramentaria, which is native to East Asia but
invaded the western shores of North America from Japan eighty years ago,
provides an opportunity to examine how environmental salinity may shape
behavioral and morphological traits. In this study, we compared the
movement distance of four B. attramentaria populations from
native (Korea and Japan) and introduced (USA) habitats under various
salinity levels (13, 23, 33, and 43 PSU) during 30 days of exposure in
the lab. We sequenced a partial mitochondrial CO1 gene to infer
phylogenetic relationships among populations and confirmed two divergent
mitochondrial lineages constituting our sample sets. Using a statistic
model-selection approach, we investigated the effects of geographic
distribution and genetic composition on locomotor performance in
response to salt stress. Snails exposed to acute low salinity (13 PSU)
reduced their locomotion and were unable to perform at their normal
level (the moving pace of snails exposed to 33 PSU). We did not detect
any meaningful differences in locomotor response to salt stress between
the two genetic lineages or between the native snails (Japan versus
Korea populations), but we found significant locomotor differences
between the native and introduced groups (Japan or Korea versus the
USA). We suggest that the greater magnitude of tidal salinity
fluctuation at the USA location may have influenced locomotor responses
to salt stress in introduced snails.