Congruence between starch gel and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in detecting allozyme variation in pulmonate land slugs

The predominantly selfing slug species Arion (Carinarion) fasciatus, A. (C.) silvaticus and A. (C.) circumscriptus are native in Europe and have been introduced into North America, where each species consists of a single, homozygous multilocus genotype (strain), as defined by starch gel electrophoresis (SGE) of allozymes. In Europe, the “one strain per species” hypothesis does not hold since polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) of allozymes uncovered 46 strains divided over the three species. However, electrophoretic techniques may differ in their ability to detect allozyme variation. Therefore, several Carinarion populations from both continents were screened by applying the two techniques simultaneously on the same individual slugs and enzyme loci. SGE and PAGE yielded exactly the same results, so that the different degree of variation in North American and European populations cannot be attributed to differences in resolving power between SGE and PAGE. We found four A. (C.) silvaticus strains in North America indicating that in this region the “one strain per species” hypothesis also cannot be maintained. Hence, the discrepancies between previous electrophoretic studies on Carinarion are most likely due to sampling artefacts and possible founder effects.