Journal of Threatened Taxa |
www.threatenedtaxa.org | 26 March 2021 | 13(3): 18035–18038
ISSN 0974-7907 (Online) | ISSN 0974-7893
(Print)
https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.6609.13.3.18035-18038
#6609 | Received 24 August 2020 | Final
received 18 February 2021 | Finally accepted 20 February 2021
Freshwater medusae Limnocnida indica Annandale,
1911 in the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, Dubare
Reserve Forest and Shivanasamudram in Karnataka,
India, with a commentary note on the exotic Craspedacusta
sowerbii Lankester,
1880
Naren Sreenivasan
1 & Joshua Barton 2
1 Wildlife
Association of South India, # 19 Victoria Road, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560047,
India.
1 Foundation
for Rivers and Ecosystems, # 51/24, Rathna Avenue,
Richmond Road. Bengaluru, Karnataka 560025, India.
2 #1/f, 172 5th
Main, Defense Colony, Indiranagar, Bengaluru,
Karnataka 560038, India.
1 naren.sreen002@gmail.com
(corresponding author), 2 jwbarton@imageindia.asia
Editor:
Anonymity requested. Date of
publication: 26 March 2021 (online & print)
Citation: Sreenivasan, N. & J.
Barton (2021). Freshwater medusae Limnocnida
indica Annandale, 1911 in the Cauvery Wildlife
Sanctuary, Dubare Reserve Forest and Shivanasamudram in Karnataka, India, with a commentary note
on the exotic Craspedacusta sowerbii Lankester, 1880. Journal
of Threatened Taxa 13(3): 18035–18038. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.6609.13.3.18035-18038
Copyright:
© Sreenivasan & Barton 2021. Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License. JoTT allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and
distribution of this article in any medium by providing adequate credit to the
author(s) and the source of publication.
Funding: None.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
There are over 20 species of freshwater medusae
belonging to six genera found across the world, however, the taxonomy of more
than half of them are uncertain (Jankowski 2001). Of these, four genera have been reported from
India, Limnocnida, Craspedacusta, Mansariella,
and Keralika.
Freshwater medusae are severely understudied globally (Ahmad et al.
1987; Dumont 1994) and lack conservation importance. For instance, more than 100 years after their
discovery, none of the Limnomedusa are assessed on
the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
The most popular hypothesis to the origin of the freshwater medusae is
their evolution from a common ancestor from the Tethys Sea (Dumont 1994) which
later adapted to a freshwater form (Stadel 1961) and
dispersed across landmasses. In India, Limnomedusae were first believed to have dispersed westward
from the Bay of Bengal to the Western Ghats and then northward to the Himalaya
(Rao 1931). Ahmad et al. (1987),
however, disagree, proposing that the dispersal of the Limnomedusae
was in a southwardly direction starting from the Himalaya; evidenced by the
presence of Mansariella lacustris
which is endemic to an isolated lake in the Himalayan region (Malhotra et al.
1976).
Two genera of Limnomedusae
are of interest to this note, i.e., Limnocnida
and Craspedacusta. The genus Limnocnida
has three confirmed species in India, L. indica
Annandale, 1911, believed to be endemic to the Western Ghats
(Annandale 1911; Agharkar 1913; Ramakrishna et al.
1950; Birsal 1994), L. nepalensis
(Dumont, 1976) and L. biharensis
(Ahmad et al., 1987), are both from northern India. Craspedacusta
is a genus with three confirmed species spread across eastern Asia, of which
only C. sowerbii has been reported from
the Indian sub-continent. The first
formal record of L. indica was from the
Koyna and Venna rivers of the Krishna Basin
(Annandale 1911), where medusae were reported annually during summer months
when flowing rivers are reduced to pools.
Other locations where L. indica
are reported include Pampadampara tanks and Periyar Lake in Travancore (Darling 1935; Jones 1951), Sharavathi River, at the bottom of Jog Falls (Ramakrishna
et al. 1950), Thunga River (Iyengar
& Venkatesh 1955) and the Krishnarajasagar
Reservoir on the Cauvery River (Krishnamurthy 1951). Recently, Limnocnida
received media attention as a chance discovery from a lake in Kodaikanal (Saravanan et al. 2018).
In the Cauvery Basin, there are only two published
reports of L. indica. The first report is from Krishnarajasagar
Reservoir near Sagarkatte Village on the 27 April
1948 (Krashnamurthy 1951). The second report is from the Hemavathi Reservoir between February and March 2002–2004
(Manna et al. 2005). There is a growing
concern among nature enthusiasts that freshwater medusae in the Cauvery River
are invasive species. Oualid et al. (2019) highlight the negative implications of
a similar global trend of exponentially increasing number of morphology-based
reports of invasive species. In the
Cauvery, this misidentification is largely due to the lesser-known status of L.
indica that are easily mistaken for C. sowerbii, a better-known cosmopolitan species (Jankowski
2001; Fritz et al. 2007; Oualid et al. 2019)
originating from the Yangzte River in China (Kramp 1950). C.
sowerbii are considered invasive at many
locations (Oualid et al. 2019) including India (Riyas & Kumar 2017).
The invasiveness and impact of freshwater medusae on ecosystems are
still not well known (Riyas & Kumar 2017),
however, since they feed on zooplankton (Spadinger
& Maier 1999; Jankowski 2000; Jankowski & Ratte
2001; Stefani et al. 2010) and occasionally on small fish and their eggs (Jankowski
et al. 2007), their potential to become invasive in large numbers cannot be
ruled out (Dumont 1994; Jankowski et al. 2005).
Fortunately, there are only three reports of the C. sowerbii in India and all three of them were found
in artificial structures. Joshi & Tanapi (1965) made the first report from an experimental
tank at the Poona University on 18 August 1962.
Sarkar & Mude (2010) reported C. sowerbii from an abandoned rock quarry at Kunnanpara near Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. Riyas & Kumar
(2017) recently reported C. sowerbii
from an artificial pond at Chemeenchal, Vallakunnu, Thrissur district, Kerala in November
2016. There is one additional report
from the Kodagu District (Sarkar & Mude 2010) in
which C. sowerbii is reported from the
Cauvery River but no photographs are available and it may be possible that they
were misidentified.
Here, we report the occurrence of L. indica medusae from three locations in the Cauvery
River in Karnataka: 1) Doddamakkali, in the Cauvery
Wildlife Sanctuary (12.308N, 77.217E), 2) Dubare
elephant camp, Dubare Reserve Forest in Kodagu
District (12.371N, 75.905E), and 3) Malligemaradahalla
Lake, near Shivanasamudram (12.301N, 77.144E) where
recreational anglers from the Wildlife Association of South India (NGO) report
a sighting of freshwater medusae on 13 April 2007. In Doddamakkali, L.
indica were found in almost stagnant
waters in the recesses of large rock formations on the sides of the Cauvery
River; in pools fed from rainwater or formed by the receding river itself. In Dubare, the
medusae were observed in very still waters of an inlet off the main river. In Malligemaradahalla
Lake the medusae were noticed along the bank close to an inlet canal. At all locations, the water was still, there
was no sediment, the bed was rocky and the surface of the water was
shaded. Medusae were observed at a depth
of half a meter to one meter. They were
active, usually swimming downward at shallow angles and upward more
vertically. Sometimes 20–30 individuals
could be seen in one square meter area
but they did not seem to gather in any particular pattern. The medusae moved smoothly in the typical
style of a jellyfish and did not react noticeably to any disturbance by the
observer or equipment. All observations
were made during the afternoon and photographs were taken using a Nikon D800
with a Tokina 10-17mm wide angle, using natural light
in an Aquatica underwater housing.
Both species L. indica
and C. sowerbii are closely related
in morphology but can be distinguished in the field by the arrangement of the
gonads on the manubrium (Darling 1935; Ahmad et al. 1987). C. sowerbii
have large ‘pouch-like’ gametogenic tissue that hang from the radial canals
(Jankowski 2001; Oualid et al. 2019) and in L.
indica the gonads are arranged in a ring
around the stomach (Ahmad et al. 1987) (See Image 1). Further, Joshi & Tonapi
(1965) suggest that C. sowerbii occur
in August in India while the medusae of L. indica
are reported in pre-monsoon between February and May (Agharkar
1913; Rao 1931; Joshi & Tonapi 1965; Birsal 1994). This
temporal variation in the occurrence of medusae can also be considered as a
good distinguishing character between the two genera. This first report of L. indica from the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary (an IUCN
category IV protected area) in addition to several other endemic and endangered
fish species (Sreenivasan et al. 2021) such as the
Humpback Mahseer Tor remadevii, Silund Catfish Silonia childreni, and Nilgiri Mystus Hemibagrus
punctatus highlights the importance of approximately 80 km of river habitat
that lies between Shivanasamudram Falls and Hoganekal Falls.
This stretch of the river is especially important from a conservation
perspective as it is the last ‘free-flowing’ river stretch along the otherwise
heavily utilized Cauvery River.
References
Agharkar, S.P. (1913). Further notes on the habits and distribution of Limnocnida indica. Records
of the Indian Museum 9: 247–249.
Ahmad, M.F., N.S. Sen., K.P.
Mishra & A.K. Bharti (1987). A
new species of Limnocnida (Limnomedusae,
Coelenterata) from a freshwater aquarium in
India. Hydrobiologia, 144(1): 33–36.
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00008049
Annandale, N. (1911). The occurrence of a fresh-water medusa (Limnocnida) in Indian streams. Nature 87(2179):
144–144. https://doi.org/10.1038/087144b0
Birsal, N.R. (1994). Occurrence of Limnocnida
indica (Annadale) in
the Pandri River (Western Ghats, Karnataka, India),
with a note on freshwater medusae of India. Journal of Bombay Natural
History Society, 91, 91–94.
Darling, P.S. (1935). Occurrence of Limnocnida in
the Periyar lake, Travancore. Nature, 135(3404):
151. https://doi.org/10.1038/135151a0
Dumont, H.J. (1976). Limnocnida nepalensis n. sp.(coelenterata:
limnomedusae), a new freshwater medusa from central
Nepal, with a discussion of the origin and distribution of the genus. Khumbu
Himal 5: 255–262.
Dumont, H.J. (1994). The distribution and ecology of the fresh- and brackish-water
medusae of the world. In: Studies on the Ecology of Tropical Zooplankton,
Developments in Hydrobiology, 92: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0884-3_1
Fritz, G.B., R.O. Schill, M. Pfannkuchen & F. Brümmer (2007). The freshwater jellyfish Craspedacusta
sowerbii Lankester, 1880 (Limnomedusa: Olindiidae) in
Germany, with a brief note on its nomenclature. Journal of Limnology, 66
(1), 54–59. https://doi.org/10.4081/jlimnol.2007.54
Iyengar, H.D.R. & Venkatesh (1955). Occurrence of the freshwater medusa Limnocnida indica Annandale,
in Thunga river near Shimoga
town, Mysore State. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 53:
151.
Jankowski, T. (2000). Chemical composition and biomass parameters of a
population of Craspedacusta sowerbii Lank, 1880 (Cnidaria: Limnomedusa). Journal
of Plankton Research 22(7): 1329–1340.
Jankowski, T. (2001). The freshwater medusae of the world–a taxonomic and
systematic literature study with some remarks on other inland water jellyfish. Hydrobiologia 462(1–3): 91–113. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013126015171
Jankowski, T. & H.T. Ratte (2001). On
the influence of the freshwater jellyfish Craspedacusta
sowerbii on the zooplankton community. Internationale Vereinigung für theoretische und angewandte Limnologie: Verhandlungen 27(6): 3287–3290. https://doi.org/10.1080/03680770.1998.11902433
Jankowski, T., T. Strauss &
H.T. Ratte (2005). Trophic interactions of the freshwater jellyfish Craspedacusta sowerbii. Journal
of Plankton Research 27(8): 811–823. https://doi.org/10.1093/plankt/fbi055
Jankowski, T., A.G. Collins &
R. Campbell (2007). Global
diversity of inland water cnidarians. Hydrobilogica
595: 35–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8259-7_4
Joshi, M.V. & G.T. Tonapi (1965). A
new record of freshwater medusa from India. Current Science 34(23):
665–666.
Jones, S. (1951). On the occurrence of the freshwater medusa, Limnocnida indica
Annandale, in the western drainage of the Sahyadris. Journal
of the Bombay Natural History Society 49: 799–801.
Kramp, P.L. (1950). Freshwater medusae in China, pp. 165–184. In: Proceedings
of the Zoological Society of London – Vol. 120(1). Oxford, UK:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 187pp. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1950.tb01469.x
Krishnamurthy, D.R. (1951). On the occurrence of the freshwater medusa in the Krishnarajasagar on the Cauvery. Journal of Bombay
Natural History Society 50: 955–956.
Malhotra, Y.R., P.I., Duda & M.K. Jyothi (1976). Mansariella lacustris, a new freshwater medusa from jammu, india. Current Science 45:
190–191.
Manna, R.K., A.K. Das, D.N. Singh
& M.F. Khan (2005). Occurrence
of fresh water jelly-fish, Limnocnida indica (Annadale) in Hemavathi reservoir and its limnological perspective. Indian
Journal of Fisheries 52(4): 483–487.
Oualid, J.A., B. Iazza, N.M. Tamsouri, F.E. Aamri, A. Moukrim & P.J. López–González (2019). Hidden diversity under morphology–based identifications
of widespread invasive species: the case of the ‘well–known hydromedusa Craspedacusta sowerbii
Lankester 1880. Animal Biodiversity and
Conservation 42(2): 301–316. https://doi.org/10.32800/abc.2019.42.0301
Sarkar, P.K. & S.N. Mude (2010). A
new site for the freshwater jellyfish Craspedacusta
sowerbii. Current Science 99(9):
1165.
Sreenivasan, N., N. Mahesh &
R. Raghavan (2021). Freshwater
fishes of Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary, Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. Journal
of Threatened Taxa 13(1): 17470–17476. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.6778.13.1.17470-17476
Ramakrishna, P.A., B.S. Bhimachar & M.K. Subramaniam (1950). Occurrence of the freshwater medusa (Limnocnida indica)
in south west India. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society 49:
318–319.
Rao, H.S. (1931). The supposed resting stage of Limnocnida
indica Annandale. Nature 127(3217):
971–971. https://doi.org/10.1038/127971a0
Riyas, A. & A.B. Kumar (2017). Record of freshwater jellyfish blooms of invasive Craspedacusta sowerbii Lankester, 1880 (Hydrozoa, Limnomedusae) from Kerala, India. Journal of
Aquatic Biology, Fisheries 5: 154–159.
Saravanan, R., I. Syed, K.K. Joshi
& A.K.A. Nazar (2018). Diversity of freshwater jellyfish in India with a
note on the hydromedusae from Kodaikanal lake. Report
of the Conference: International Seminar on Coastal and Marine Diodiversity and Conservation, Parangipettai.
Stadel, O. (1961). Neuere Kenntnisse über Ökologie und
Verbreitung der Süßwassermeduse
Craspedacusta sowerbii. Naturwissenschaftlicher Verein 5: 157–192.
Stefani, F., B. Leoni, A. Marieni
& L. Garibaldi (2010). A new record
of Craspedacusta sowerbii,
Lankester 1880 (Cnidaria, Limnomedusae)
in northern Italy. Journal of Limnology 69(1): 189–192. https://doi.org/10.3274/JL10-69-1-N1