Acroptychia bathiei : Fischer-Piette & Bedoucha 1965
Creators: name: Griffiths, O. L.
name: Herbert, D. G.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2013
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Animalia
Mollusca
Gastropoda
Architaenioglossa
Cyclophoridae
Acroptychia
Acroptychia bathiei

description: Acroptychia bathiei Fischer-Piette & Bedoucha, 1965
Figs 2, 3, 25A
Acroptychia bathiei: Fischer-Piette & Bedoucha 1965: 61, fig. 12, pl. 1, figs 9–11; Fischer-Piette et al. 1993: 47, pl. 1, figs 19–21. Type loc.: ‘près de la rivière Andranomavo (Ambongo)’ [Perrier de la Bâthie leg.], NW Madagascar’.
Morphological notes:
External features (Fig. 25A): Head-foot mostly greyish, irregularly mottled with darker spots and blotches; eyestalks pale, but tentacles more or less uniformly dark; forehead and snout brown; tip of snout shallowly indented in mid-line; skin texture relatively smooth.
Operculum: Corneous, oligospiral with an eccentric nucleus.
Radula (Fig. 3): Formula 1+2+1+2+1; length 12 mm, with ca 140 tooth rows [ca 11.5 rows/mm]; teeth robust. Rachidian tricuspid with a rounded central cusp and two smaller lateral ones; inner and outer laterals similar, each with four cusps, of which the second is consistently the largest; marginals bicuspid, the outer cusp larger. Very similar to that of A. culminans Fischer-Piette & Bedoucha, 1965, as described and illustrated by FisherPiette et al. (1969), except that the outer lateral is mostly tricuspid in that species.
Locality data: Namoroka: st’ns 930/97, 932/97. Antsingimavo: st’ns 04/06, 06/06, 08/06. Tsingy Beanka: st’ns 03/06, 11/06–13/06, 16/06–18/06, 01/09, 02/09, 06/09–09/09, 11/09, 01/10, 03/10, 05/10–08/10, 10/10. Tsingy de Bemaraha: st’ns 07/95, 14/95, 18/95, 09/96, 10/96, 12/96, 14/96. South bank of Tsiribihina R.: st’n 02/99LP.
Distribution: Restricted to central W Madagascar; from the Tsiribihina R. and southern Bemaraha region through Tsingy Beanka and Antsingimavo to the Namoroka area.
Habitat: Dry mixed deciduous-evergreen forest growing on limestone; living in leaflitter, under limestone rocks and in soil pockets on karst boulders; patchily common at both Tsingy Beanka and Antsingimavo. Also common throughout most of the Tsingy de Bemaraha reserve.
Remarks: A moderately sized, thick-shelled species with a single, well-developed, terminal, peristomal varix. Diameter rarely more than 24 mm. Shell essentially smooth save for fine axial pliculae on the early teleoconch whorls and fine, close-set growth-lines on later whorls. Umbilicus relatively narrow and deep. Juveniles have a much thinner shell that is frequently weakly angled at the periphery (Fig. 2F).
The ground colour ranges from a pale yellowish white to a deeper pinkish or orangebrown; in fresh specimens this is overlain by a fine, irregular whitish mottling, which is in turn overlain by a thin, rather glossy, corneous periostracum. However, the latter is commonly eroded in parts, after which the whitish mottling is quickly worn off and the shell becomes more uniformly coloured. A darker spiral line is frequently present just below the periphery, occasionally another just above it and sometimes a third in the middle of the base.
Family Pomatiidae Newton, 1891
Genus Tropidophora Troschel, 1847
Tropidophora chavani Fischer-Piette, 1949
Figs 4, 9E
Tropidophora chavani: Fischer-Piette 1949: 15, pl. 1, figs 4–6; Fischer-Piette & Bedoucha 1965: 73; FischerPiette et al. 1993: 102, pl. 5, figs 6–8. Type loc.: ‘gorges de Salapanga (Bemaraka)’ [= Bemaraha].
Locality data: Tsingy Beanka: st’ns 12/06, 14/06, 15/06, 01/09, 02/09, 06/09, 07/09, 08/09, 09/09, 01/10, 05/10, 07/10, 08/10, 09/10, 10/10. Tsingy de Bemaraha: st’ns 18/95, 04/96, 09/96, 10/96, 12/96.
Distribution: A narrow-range endemic; currently recorded only from the Bemaraha region and Tsingy Beanka.
Habitat: Dry forest growing on limestone; found in leaf-litter and between limestone boulders.
Remarks:A moderately common species in the central Tsingy Beanka, but usually present at rather low density. It is characterised by its low spire and uniformly fine spiral sculpture. Specimens with a similarly dense spiral sculpture have been collected at Andranavory in the Toliara [Tuléar] region, but these are more elevated and have a flaring white lip, which is broadly reflected in the columella region, half covering the umbilicus. They are closer to T. semidecussata (Pfeiffer, 1847) than they are to T. chavani.
description: Published as part of Griffiths, O. L. & Herbert, D. G., 2013, New species of land snails (Mollusca: Gastropoda) from two isolated karst formations in central western Madagascar: Tsingy Beanka and Antsingimavo, with additional notes on other regional endemics, pp. 1-48 in African Invertebrates 54 (1) on pages 5-7, DOI: 10.5733/afin.054.0101, http://zenodo.org/record/7670100