Abstract
The distribution and food habit of the flatworm species Platydemus manokwari which is known to be a predator of land snails, were examined on Chichijima Island of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands, Japan. P. manokwari was distributed over a wide area of the island. Few live land snails were found in the area where P. manokwari was distributed. Further, it was revealed that P. manokwari fed not only on live land snails including predatory species, but also on other food resources such as live flatworms or a land nemertean species and the carcasses of slugs and earthworms. Therefore, P. manokwari is expected to survive even if the populations of land snails are almost lost on Chichijima Island in the future, and so will affect the biodiversity of Chichijima Island.
Reprinted from Ohbayashi T, Okochi I, Sato H, Ono T (2005) Applied Entomology and Zoology 40:609–614, with permission of the Japanese Society of Applied Entomology and Zoology.
(Received 26 August 2004; Accepted 5 July 2005)
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Satoshi Chiba of Tohoku University, Dr. Masaharu Kawakatsu, Dr. Kiyonori Tomiyama of Kagoshima University, Mr. Nathaniel Savory Jr. and Mr. Koji Takeuchi for their helpful advice. We also thank Ms. Toshie Suzuki-Sato, who first detected that P. manokwari fed on the carcasses of earthworms in the field. We also thank Ms. Fumiko Yumura, Ms. Yukari Niikawa, Ms. Noriko Saito-Karashima, and Ms. Nobuko Ono for their help in the field survey. Thanks are also due to Dr. Simon Lawson, Queensland Forestry Research Institute, for his correction of the English in this manuscript.
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Ohbayashi, T., Okochi, I., SATO, H., Ono, T. (2010). Food habit of Platydemus manokwari De Beauchamp, 1962 (Tricladida: Terricola: Rhynchodemidae), known as a predatory flatworm of land snails in the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands, Japan. In: Kawakami, K., Okochi, I. (eds) Restoring the Oceanic Island Ecosystem. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-53859-2_5
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