Disappearance or Overlooked or Untouched? - A Brief History of Aquatic Gastropoda of Malaysian Borneo
Abdulla-Al-Asif (a*), Hadi Hamli (a), Mohd Hanafi Idris (b), Carles Gili (c), AFM Arifur Rahman (b), Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal (b**)

Abstract

The aquatic Gastropoda (marine and freshwater) in Malaysian Borneo (MYB) has an ancient history of 255 years, while the first record was observed in 1767 by the pioneer Carl Linnaeus. With time, many European, native taxonomists and conservationists worked on the diverse group of Gastropoda in the Malaysian part of Borneo (states of Sabah and Sarawak). No previous work was conducted to assess the historical existence of this particular class of Mollusca. The study^s objective was to reveal the types of aquatic gastropods in MYB and the number of published research and expeditions conducted herein. The bibliometric analysis suggested that 145 research publications were mentioned the names of the region where they reported at least one species from this geographic region. Within the history of 255 years, a total of 559 species of gastropod were reported by the different research groups. Between 1767 and 1900, a total of 150 gastropod species were reported, followed by 79 species from 1900 to 2000 and 330 species from the year 2001 to 2022. The Grubbs test (p<0.05) suggested that the most outlier year in reporting of species was 2011, while it recorded 54 new species from MYB, followed by 2020 (54 species), 2001 (39 species). The most contributing taxonomist in MYB within the history of aquatic gastropod research was Han Raven and his colleagues from NBC, The Netherlands, who reported 111 new species from the region followed by Nur Leena Wong from UPM (54 new species). The finding suggested that reporting of new species from MYB is increasing, which can be interpreted as the many unexplored new sites and species still exist in this ecoregion. In this regard more expedition works, and research dimensions might help to know the exact number of aquatic gastropod species in this area. This observation will help the regional governments in making the regional biodiversity database as well as to take decision for research initiative on aquatic gastropod and management.

Keywords: Biodiversity, Taxonomy, Borneo, Mollusca, Natural History

Topic: Aquatic Biodiversity (International)