Milky flatworm (Dendrocoelum lacteum)

Mohamed bin Zayed Species project number 180520056

Conservation, description and assessment of Dendrocoelum planarians of Italy

This project has different goals, all dealing with the results obtained with the MBZ project 162514520.

The project will cover field expenses for data gathering and will be implemented trough the participation to other calls to cover all the main goals. 

 

The first aim is to  preliminarly assess the conservation status of a Dendrocoelum lacteum in Italy; this is a freshwater planarian occupying different freshwater habitats.

This is a difficult and expensive aim to be reached. We plan to make spot observations in different Italian regions to identify the occurrence of D. lacteum populations. In a limited area of North Italy we will also perform more deep investigations considering different habitats including the so called "fontanili" springs and temporary marhses.  

 

The second aim is to implement the researches of one cave-dwelling planarian (Dendrocoelum benazzii) that we did not find during the MBZ project 162514520.We will do extensive surveys in  caves with water around the D. benazzii type locality during summer 2019. 

 

The third aim is to characterise the genetic of the whole genus Dendrocoelum in northern Italy. We will focus especially on the new populations that we discovered during MBZ project 162514520. Comparisons will be performed with all the species actually occurring in the caves of Italy. Thanks to this MBZ project the costs of samplings are  covered.  To achieve this goal we will participate to calls of other insitutions to cover the expenses for the genetic analyses.