Neverita Risso, 1826

Huelsken, Thomas, Marek, Carina, Schreiber, Stefan, Schmidt, Iris & Mann, Michael Holl-, 2008, The Naticidae (Mollusca: Gastropoda) of Giglio Island (Tuscany, Italy): Shell characters, live animals, and a molecular analysis of egg masses, Zootaxa 1770, pp. 1-40 : 34

The genus Neverita Risso, 1826 on Giglio Island

Neverita josephinia is the only native Neverita species in the Mediterranean and was found on Giglio Island in large numbers. The specimens were collected in the Bay of Campese and on the sand grounds seawards of Pt. del Faraglione in the northern area of the island at a depth of 7 to 15 meters. This species prefers fine sedi-ments—no appearence of debris—at all collecting sites investigated. The specimens were found in groups of 20 or more individuals distributed in close vicinity to each other. Normally, Neverita josephinia was burrowed deep in the sand, not leaving an observable trail at the sand surface.

As noted in Doneddu & Manunza (1989) and Schiró (1977), the morphology of Neverita josephinia is very similar to that of the North American species Neverita duplicata . Schiró (1977) even distinguished the two species only at a subspecific level. In a recent study (Hülsken et al. 2006) we showed that the genetic distances between the Mediterranean N. josephinia and the North American N. duplicata and its sister taxon N. delessertiana amount to 9.0—13.3% for COI and thus lie in the range of the average COI sequence divergence reported for congeneric species of Mollusca ( Hebert et al. 2003). This clearly confirms that Neverita josephinia is a distinct Neverita species which can be separated from both Neverita duplicata and N. delessertiana . The species is distributed within the entire Mediterranean Sea (Kobelt 1901, Settepassi 1972, Schiró 1977–1978) and is very common in most regions.