Superregnum: Eukaryota
Cladus: Unikonta
Cladus: Opisthokonta
Cladus: Holozoa
Regnum: Animalia
Subregnum: Eumetazoa
Cladus: Bilateria
Cladus: Nephrozoa
Cladus: Protostomia
Cladus: Spiralia
Cladus: Lophotrochozoa
Phylum: Mollusca
Classis: Gastropoda
Subclassis: Caenogastropoda
Ordo: Littorinimorpha
Superfamilia: Stromboidea
Familia: Strombidae
Genus: Strombus
Species: Strombus alatus
Name
Strombus alatus (Gmelin, 1791)
References
Strombus alatus – Taxon details on Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS).
Vernacular names
English: Florida fighting conch
Strombus alatus, the Florida fighting conch, is a species of medium-sized, warm-water sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Strombidae, the true conchs. Its name derives two Latin words. Strombus means, in Latin, a snail with spiral shell, which derives from the Greek στρόμβος, meaning anything turned or spun around, like a top or, as in Aristotle's Historia Animalium, a sea snail. Alatus means, in Latin, "winged".
Distribution
This conch occurs in the Western Atlantic Ocean from North Carolina to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Texas, and the east coast of Mexico.[1][2]
Description
The shell can be as large as 112 mm (4.4 in).[1][3]
This species is closely similar to Strombus pugilis, the West Indian fighting conch, which has a more southerly range. S. alatus shells have less prominent subsutural spines and slightly more projected outer lips. Some scientists have treated the two as distinct species; others as subspecies.[4] In an extensive study of the Stromboidea in 2005, Simone provisionally treated these as distinct species, but observed, "no spectacular morphological difference was found [and] all related differences, even those of the genital system, can be regarded as extreme of variation of a single, wide distributed, variable species."[5]
Phylogeny
Fossil Strombus alatus
from Caloosahatchee Formation, Sarasota, Florida, USA
A cladogram based on sequences of nuclear histone H3 gene and mitochondrial cytochrome-c oxidase I (COI) gene showing phylogenetic relationships of (32 analyzed) species in the genus Strombus and Lambis, including S. alatus, was proposed by Latiolais et al. (2006):[6]
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Phylogeny and relationships of Eastern Pacific and Atlantic Strombus species, according to Latiolais et al. (2006)[6]
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