Biodiversity Data Journal :
Taxonomy & Inventories
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Corresponding author: Pavel Sroka (pavel.sroka@centrum.cz)
Academic editor: Jean-Luc Gattolliat
Received: 27 Jul 2022 | Accepted: 22 Aug 2022 | Published: 09 Sep 2022
© 2022 Pavel Sroka, Jindřiška Bojková, Vojtech Kolar
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Sroka P, Bojková J, Kolar V (2022) Mayfly Ephemera glaucops (Ephemeroptera, Ephemeridae) recorded in the Czech Republic after almost a century. Biodiversity Data Journal 10: e90950. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.10.e90950
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The mayfly Ephemera (Sinephemera) glaucops Pictet, 1843 has been considered regionally extinct in the Czech Republic, with the last occurrence dating from 1933. Its extinction was connected with the anthropogenic changes of lowland rivers, forming the original habitat of E. glaucops within the area of the Czech Republic. However, the species has been reported as spreading in man-made, often post-industrial waterbodies in Germany, The Netherlands and Austria since the 1970s.
We report E. glaucops from the Czech Republic, based on 27 larvae collected in the North Bohemia lignite basin in 2018. All individuals were found at one locality – a small kaolin pit in the shallow part near the shore, mostly without macrophytes. We provide details about the locality and morphological diagnostic characters of E. glaucops. This study highlights the importance of post-industrial sites for aquatic biodiversity as surrogate biotopes for degraded original habitats.
aquatic insects, distribution, faunistics, mayflies
The mayfly (Ephemeroptera) assemblages have been affected by profound anthropogenic changes of freshwater habitats over the last century, which often resulted in local or regional species loss (e.g.
Geographically, the species is relatively widespread; its distributional range covers large part of Europe from Sweden in the north to Spain and North Africa in the south-west and Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and possibly Greece in the south-east. The type locality is specified as Genthod, near Geneva, based on four syntypes deposited in the Natural History Museum of Geneva (
Apart from E. glaucops, three species of the genus Ephemera have been recorded in the territory of the Czech Republic, namely Ephemera (Ephemera) danica Müller, 1764, Ephemera (Ephemera) lineata Eaton, 1870 and Ephemera (Ephemera) vulgata Linnaeus, 1758. Two of these species, E. vulgata and E. danica are common, whereas E. lineata is very rare and considered endangered (
Recently, we conducted an extensive survey of freshwater invertebrates in northern and eastern Bohemia and identified E. glaucops in one of the localities studied. The goal of the present paper is to report on the occurrence of E. glaucops in the Czech Republic, to provide characteristics of its habitat and to summarise the diagnostic characters of E. glaucops from other Ephemera species occurring in the Czech Republic.
In 2018–2019, we surveyed altogether 20 different types of freshwater post-industrial sites, such as mining subsidence, sandpits, ash lagoons, quarries and kaolin pits in northern and eastern Bohemia. The localities were visited three times (in summer, autumn and spring). At each locality, we selected three sites of different microhabitats and sampled them by standardised methods: box trap and time standardised (5 min/site) sweeping with a kitchen strainer to maximise species capture (
Ephemera glaucops Pictet, 1843; Hist. nat. gen. part. Ins. Névropt., p. 132
Ephemera (Sinephemera) glaucops Pictet, 1843 in
Ephemera (Sinephemera) glaucops Pictet, 1843 in
See general Discussion below.
A total of 27 larvae of E. glaucops were collected in a single locality, a kaolin pit near the village of Hudcov (Fig.
The material was preserved in denaturised ethanol (EtOH) and identified using the keys of
From all three remaining species of Ephemera distributed in the Czech Republic, the larvae of E. glaucops can be distinguished by the colouration of the abdomen (terga VII–IX with two pairs of relatively narrow stripes, median pair less pronounced and terga II–VI with one pair of indistinct dark markings, Fig.
Morphological characters distinguishing Ephemera glaucops (A, C) and comparison with Ephemera vulgata (B, D) from the same locality. Scale: 1 mm
Of the total 20 post-industrial freshwater localities investigated in the area of northern and eastern Bohemia, E. glaucops was recorded only in the locality "kaolin pit Hudcov". Other mayfly species co-occurring in the same locality include related burrowing Ephemera (Ephemera) vulgata Linnaeus, 1758, walking/sprawling species Caenis luctuosa (Burmeister, 1839) and Caenis horaria (Linnaeus, 1758) and fish-like active species Cloeon (Cloeon) dipterum (Linnaeus, 1761) s.l. and Cloeon (Similicloeon) simile Eaton, 1870 s.l.; they are all very common in the Czech mayfly fauna (
Overall scarce historical records of E. glaucops from the Czech Republic were limited to lowland rivers in north-west Bohemia: Ohře (Eger) River near Cheb (
Our study shows the remarkable value of post-industrial sites for aquatic biodiversity, which is well-known for terrestrial biota (
As an effective means of management to increase the abundances of E. glaucops, we recommend regular small-scale disturbances of shallow parts of the waterbody to slow down succession, especially by removing macrophyte vegetation as E. glaucops prefers the early successional stage. On the other hand, the disturbances should be applied in a mosaic i.e. with parts left overgrown, as different groups of organisms could have different habitat requirements (e.g.
We thank all the colleagues who participated in fieldwork and sorting of the samples (David S. Boukal, Bruno M. Carreira, Eliška Chmelová, Andrea Landeira-Dabarca, Olga Lepšová-Skácelová, Šárka Otáhalová, Martina Poláková, Robert Tropek, Lucie Vebrová). We are also grateful to the reviewers (André Wagner and Arnold H. Staniczek) for their comments. The study was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (project nr. 18-15927S) and the programme of the Strategy AV 21 (VP21) from the Czech Academy of Sciences.