Orientogalba Kruglov & Starobogatov, 1985

Vinarski, Maxim V., Aksenova, Olga V. & Bolotov, Ivan N., 2020, Taxonomic assessment of genetically-delineated species of radicine snails (Mollusca, Gastropoda, Lymnaeidae), Zoosystematics and Evolution 96 (2), pp. 577-608 : 577

Genus Orientogalba Kruglov & Starobogatov, 1985

Orientogalba Kruglov and Starobogatov 1985a: 28.

Viridigalba Kruglov and Starobogatov 1985a: 29.

Type species.

Lymnaea heptapotamica Lazareva, 1967.

Kruglov and Starobogatov (1985a) established their subgenus Lymnaea (Orientogalba) to embrace five nominal lymnaeid species distributed in a vast Pacific Region, stretching from north-eastern Asia to the Guam and Hawaii. Though, conchologically, these snails resemble representatives of the genus Galba , their genital morphology is typical for the radicines ( Kruglov 2005). The molecular analysis conducted by Aksenova et al. (2018a) has shown that there are at least three biological species within Orientogalba , which are presumably allopatric: O. viridis (Indonesia and Pacific Islands), O. ollula (Far East and, probably, some regions of Central Asia) and O. cf. bowelli (known from Sichuan, China and, probably, also inhabiting Tibet). The actual range of these species remains unknown since only a limited set of sequences has been available. The true species content of Orientogalba is unknown as well, because some nominal species of this genus, such as Orientogalba heptapotamica (Lazareva) and O. lenaensis (Kruglov et Starobogatov, 1985) have not been studied molecularly. The true taxonomic position of " Austropeplea viridis ", recently recorded from Spain as an alien species (Schniebs et al. 2017), must also be clarified.

In our opinion, the genus Orientogalba is not a junior synonym of the genus Austropeplea Cotton, 1942, as was suggested by some authors ( Ponder and Waterhouse 1997; Schniebs et al. 2017).