RFLP pattern determination for the invasive bivalves Limnoperna fortunei (Dunker, 1857) and Corbicula fluminea (Muller, 1774)

Abstract

The golden mussel (Limnoperna fortunei) and Corbicula fluminea are considered well-established invasive species in the rivers of Brazil and South America. In addition to the environmental problems resulting from this invasion process, the economic issue, especially in hydroelectric dams, is very worrisome and has mobilized several types of studies on these invasive bivalves. The detection and identification of these organisms in their adult phase in the rivers is not a problem; however, the identification of bivalve larvae by usual morphological methods is difficult due to high similarity conserved in these stages. The use of PCR-RFLP has proven to be an efficient and agile molecular method that allowed the detection of different patterns in the agarose gel for the two bivalves tested. The gel pattern showed a 100 bp band for L. fortunei not detected for C. fluminea. Thus, it is possible to detect larvae of these species from water samples, which can be a powerful tool for environmental monitoring programs on aquatic invasive species.

Population growth of the golden mussel (L. fortunei) in hydroelectric power plants: a study via mathematical and computational modeling

“…This approach, in addition to being slow and laborious, is not usually applied to animals with population sizes in the order of magnitude of the golden mussel, which can reach trillions of individuals in a single hydroelectric reservoir. Emerging methods using statistical or molecular analysis techniques to estimate the abundance of organisms have already been successfully applied in determining the population size of other animals (Burguera & Oliver, 2016;Pie et al, 2017;Xia et al, 2017;Oliveira Junior et al, 2018;Iwai et al, 2019).…”