Lottiidae
Lottia pelta
The Lottiidae are a family meeresbewohnender snails that occur in cold to warm seas worldwide. As grazers they live on algae and lichens.
Features
Turtles snails have a conical, bilaterally symmetrical shell without turns, which is like the house of limpets. The Apex is located in the middle or something before that. The shells are sculpted mainly radially from the tip toward the edge. The interior of the shell is like porcelain and without pearly. The muscle attachment on the shell is horseshoe- shaped. Depending on the type varies the housing length of the adult animal from a few millimeters to 5 cm, only the largest species that live on the Pacific coast of North America Lottia gigantea, reaching 9 cm. The snails have no operculum.
The head has a sharp snout. Eyes may be present or absent. The big foot is very strong. Unlike the genuine limpets located in the mantle cavity of Lottiidae a true gill.
The snails are hermaphrodites with external fertilization. The eggs develop over a short trochophore stage to free-swimming veliger larvae metamorphose after an extended pelagic phase to small snails.
Way of life
The Lottiidae live on rocks in the intertidal zone and in deeper waters, where they laid eyes with his foot like a limpet on the rocky ground and the nursery graze with their radula. The snails are herbivores and feed on algae and lichens which they rasp, with their powerful radula.
In the North Sea the family through the Turtle Snail ( Testudinalia testudinalis ) and the Virgin limpet ( Tectura virginea ) is represented.
System
The Lottiidae family is loud Nakano & Sasaki (2011), who employed this molecular genetic studies, one in six families in the superfamily Lottioidea or eight families in the order Patellogastropoda. Had Nakano & Ozawa (2007) have summarized the Acmaeidae under the Lottiidae, they are now back to their normal family. Note, however, that about the Virgin limpet, before 2007 provided as Acmaea virginea to Acmaeidae, now as Tectura virginea one of the Lottiidae. Thus also quite new descriptions of the genus and family no longer apply fully.
The family includes 14 genera Lottiidae:
- Actinoleuca Oliver, 1926
- Asteracmea Oliver, 1926
- Atalacmea Iredale, 1915
- Discurria Lindberg, 1988
- Lottia Gray, 1833
- Nipponacmea Sasaki & Okutani, 1993
- Notoacmea Iredale, 1915
- Quoy & Gaimard Patelloida, 1834
- Potamacmaea Peile, 1922
- Radiacmea Iredale, 1915
- Scurria Gray, 1847
- Tectura Gray, 1847
- Testudinalia Moskalev, 1966
- Yayoiacmea Sasaki & Okutani, 1993