Background
The Kastellorizo island grup (in the Dodecanese, Greece) is situated in the southeast corner of the Aegean Archipelago. It consists of twenty islets, of which the three largest (Kastellorizo, Ro and Strongyli) and seven smaller ones belong to Greece. Knowledge of the malacofauna on the islands is relatively poor. Only eight species were known prior to the present study, all from the islet of Kastellorizo.
Results
Here, using the scientific collections at the Natural History Museum of Crete collected mainly by the authors and also by several researchers since 1976, we reappraise the malacofauna of the island group. Thirty-one species were found in keseluruhan (23 from Kastellorizo, 19 from Ro, 15 from Strongyli, 10 from Agios Georgios, 14 from Agrielia, 6 from Psomi and 10 from Psoradia).
Conclusions
The fact that there are nomor endemic snail species in the islands can be accounted for by their proximity to the Turkish coast, their common paleogeography with Turkey until the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, and the influence of humans. All but two species, Mastus etuberculatus and Vitrea riedeliana, are known from the adjacent Turkish coasts. Together with the subfossil species found on the smaller islets, the predominance of different species on each islet suggests a continuous substitution from the source areas of Turkey and the Aegean.
Background
The Kastellorizo (=Megisti) island grup is situated in the southeast corner of the Aegean Archipelago, 140 km east of Rhodes and less than 5 km south of the Turkish coast (Fig. 1). It consists of 20 islands, half of which belong to Greece and the other half to Turkey. Of the largest ones, Kastellorizo, Ro and Strongyli, belong to Greece. Kastellorizo is the only inhabited and accessible island, while special permission is required to visit the others.
exist on the biggest islets. The climate is thermomediterranean [1], and the predominant vegetation consists of phrygana and maquis. Human presence has been intensive and continuous for over 2000 years on Kastellorizo alone, which was historically one of the safest ports in the Eastern Mediterranean basin. The few hundred present-day inhabitants work in tourism, agriculture and livestock farming. Due to their environmental characteristics, all the Greek islands in the Kastellorizo grup have been placed within the “Natura 2000” network.
Our information on the terrestrial malacofauna of the island grup was very poor, as the extremely limited previous information were restricted to the island of Kastellorizo. H Rolle was the first person to collect land snails there in 1894, followed almost a century later by A Liebegott in 1983 and 1996. A keseluruhan of eight species were reported, and all references are commented in the discussion.
This paper presents an extensive study of the local malacofauna, based on a wealth of material collected by the authors in 1996, as well as on samples occasionally gathered by other scientists since 1976 and deposited in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Crete—University of Crete (NHMC). Taxonomical, ecological and distributional characteristics of the species found are also discussed in relation to the malacofauna of nearby areas and other islands in the Aegean.