Dear Winston
the Mediterranean Sea fauna is reasonably well known.
Even if the number of species increases steadily due to lessepsian and
other alien species you can find a reasonable estimate of the number of
species in recent literature.

Sabelli B., Giannuzzi-Savelli R., Bedulli D., 1990. Catalogo annotato dei
molluschi marini del Mediterraneo. Edizioni Libreria Naturalistica
Bolognese, Bologna; 3 voll., pp. XIV-781
is a major catalogue which encompasses all molluscs. Unfortunately, species
are not numbered, so it is needed to count them one by one.

Chiarelli S., 1999. Nuovo catalogo delle conchiglie marine del Mediterraneo.
is an update based on literature. It does not contain nudibranchs, but
species are numbered: 1748. I guess it is a reasonable estimate of the
Mediterranean fauna. Adding nudibranchs and recently discovered species you
may reach 2000 species.

The CLEMAM website at http://www.somali.asso.fr/clemam/index.clemam.html
can give you information on the European fauna (from the arctic seas to the
Mediterranean and Black Sea.  Unfortunately, I do not know how to obtain a
full list. However, there is a powerful search engine which can be used for
this aim with some work.

Best regards
Paolo



At 16.22 19/05/2008 +1000, you wrote:

>I am looking for reliable estimates of numbers of marine mollusc species
>from reasonably well defined geographic regions eg. Atlantic coast of N
>America, western Europe, Hawaii, Philippines, Japan, Atlantic Ocean,
>Mediterranean Sea, etc etc.
>
>
>
>The numbers I am after would either be full faunas ie all molluscs,  or
>all members of one or more major groups (class, subclass)
>
>I would be grateful for any pointers, ideally with a source reference.
>
>
>
>Many thanks for your help
>
>
>
>Winston Ponder
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Paolo G. ALBANO
Bologna, ITALY
Webmaster of Società Italiana di Malacologia website at http://www.sim-online.it


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