Abstract
New information on the occurrence of Helobdella europaea Kutschera, 1987 was obtained. Four individuals assigned to this species were found in a private aquarium in Kharkiv. Helobdella europaea has not been recorded for Ukraine so far. The taxonomic identity of the leeches was confirmed by both a morphological examination and a molecular phylogenetic analysis based on all available cox1 sequences of Helobdella leeches. Helobdella europaea was found to have extremely low genetic diversity, which has been probably caused by the founder effect. The variability of the coloration pattern of H. europaea was documented and discussed in the light of its potential usefulness for identification. The species can invade local freshwater ecosystems as has been already happened elsewhere.
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Acknowledgments
Our sincere thanks go to the now late Prof. Yuriy Shkorbatov for providing us with leeches from his aquarium. We are very grateful to Fredric Govedich for sharing the information on the undescribed species from Arizona, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. This research was supported in part by the grant No. 0117 U004836 of the Ministry Education and Science of Ukraine and a grant of the Systematic Research Fund for the project “Taxonomic revision of the Caucasian leeches (Annelida, Hirudinida)”.
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Morhun, H., Sidorovskyi, S., Khomenko, A. et al. First Ukrainian record of the invasive leech Helobdella europaea (Hirudinea: Glossiphoniidae) from an aquarium in Kharkiv: morphological variability and phylogenetic relationships. Biologia 76, 193–202 (2021). https://doi.org/10.2478/s11756-020-00542-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/s11756-020-00542-7