Shell Identification

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Technical Reports for a Total-Evidence Phylogenetics of Terebridae

Published on: July 2025

0009-0002-9238-4007

In this series of technical reports we lay the groundwork for a total-evidence phylogenetic reconstruction of the auger-snail family Terebridae.

  • We assemble and curate every publicly available DNA sequence—currently spanning mitochondrial ( COI, 16S) and nuclear ( 28S, H3) loci—for >100 named species.
  • These multilocus alignments are analysed under gene-tree–aware models to produce a preliminary backbone that highlights well-supported clades and pinpoints taxa needing additional sampling. These results are compared with the latest published phylogenetic trees.
  • In parallel, we train convolutional neural-network (CNN) models on a vetted image library to extract shell-morphological characters at genus and species levels, converting the CNN output into probabilistic character matrices that can be treated like discrete morphology.
  • The final phase will merge the molecular backbone and the CNN-derived characters in a total-evidence framework, yielding a dated species-level phylogeny that captures both genetic signal and phenotypic diversity within Terebridae.

Recent work underscores why this integrative step is both timely and useful. Modica et al. (2020) [1] showed that macro-evolutionary tests of environmental drivers versus venom-apparatus evolution “do not identify any of the tested traits as drivers of diversification, suggesting that either additional traits and/or sampling of species is required,”. Likewise, Fedosov et al. (2020) explicitly integrated shell characters and anatomy with an expanded molecular backbone and recommended DNA-based diagnoses coupled to detailed morphological descriptions for a comprehensive classification . Taken together, these studies provide a clear rationale for our goal: a total-evidence phylogeny that can serve simultaneously as a robust classificatory scaffold and a platform for testing ecological and evolutionary hypotheses in Terebridae.

Technical Reports

Gene phylogenetic tree of Terebridae based on Cox1
Gene phylogenetic tree of Cox1 gene of 760 sequences of Terebridae, retrieved at July 2025.

Technical Report: Phylogenetic Analysis of the ribosomal DNA genes: 12s, 16s, 28s
A phylogenetic analysis of the Terebridae based on all publicly available rDNA markers (mitochondrial 12S rRNA, 16S rRNA; nuclear 28S rRNA).

References