Origin of the introduced German population of Micropontica caucasica (A. Schmidt, 1868) and phylogenetic relationships within the genus (Gastropoda: Clausiliidae)

A population of the Caucasian doorsnail Micropontica caucasica has recently been discovered in the Huy Ridge in western Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. The present thriving population is in all like lihood the result of a deliberate introduction by the late Prof. Dr Eberhard Clauss who lived in Quedlinburg and collected extensively in the Caucasus region. We used mitochondrial sequence data and multilocus AFLP data to elucidate the origin and relationships of the German population to potential source popula-tions in the Greater Caucasus. The results of our molecular genetic analyses suggest that the German population of M. caucasica originated from the Mzymta Valley near Monastyr in the Russian Greater Caucasus where Clauss collected the species in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, our data corroborate the status of the recently described M. olgae from Abkhazia as a distinct species.