Larval stages of trematodes obtained from the freshwater snail Melanoides tuberculata (Cerithioidea, Thiaridae) as intermediate host were studied by using cercarial emergence and crushing snails. Between December 2004 and September 2009 snails from one hundred twenty locations in Thailand were collected every two months for one year at each sampling site. Counts per unit of time method was used in this study, and the samples of snails were collected every 10 minutes per sampling by five collectors. The cercarial stages were examined using shedding and crushing methods. The infection rate was found to be 18.79%, i.e. 6,019 animals infected in a total of 32,026. Nine different types in eighteen species of cercariae were categorized, viz. are (1) Parapleurophocercous

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Thiaridae are a speciose group of freshwater snails in tropical areas including a high number of described nominal taxa for which modern revisions are mostly lacking. Using an integrative approach, the systematic status of a group of thiarids from the Oriental region, including the nominal species Melaniaaspera and M.rudis, is reassessed on the basis of shell morphology and biometry, radula dentition patterns, and reproductive biology along with molecular genetic methods. Our results suggest that populations from the Oriental region cannot be distinguished on the basis of shell morphology, radula characters and their reproductive mode and are monophyletic based on mitochondrial sequences. Hence, M.rudis with M.aspera are regarded as belonging to the same species along with several other nominal taxa that were previously included in M.rudis. Moreover, populations from Thailand and Australia, from where the species was not previously recorded, could be shown to form a monophyletic group together with samples from Indonesia. However, a generic affiliation with Thiara, in which the investigated taxa were often included in the past, was not supported in our phylogenetic analyses, highlighting the need for a comprehensive revision of the genus-group systematics of Thiaridae as a whole.