Brephulopsis cylindrica (Menke, 1828)

Brephulopsis cylindrica (Menke, 1828) View in CoL

Despite the fact that by the middle of the 20th century, the rercords of B. cylindrica were known not only in the south of Ukraine outside the Crimean peninsula (see below), but also in Moldova, the vicinity of Novorossiysk, Anapa and Sukhumi ( Likharev & Rammelmeyer, 1952), the natural range of this species is usually considered limited to the Crimea ( Schileyko, 1984; Vychalkovskaya, 2008). In particular, there is no fossil evidence of the presence of B. cylindrica in the Northern Black Sea region ( Kunitsa, 1974).

Already at the beginning of the 20th century, some finds of B. cylindrica were described from Odesa (collected in 1902), as well as from the territory of the present Kherson

(St. Gregory Biziukiv Monastery near Chervonyi Maiak) and Zaporizhzhia (Kamianka-Dniprovska) Regions ( Lindholm, 1908). With the exception of the port city of Odesa, these sites were located along the Dnipro River, and since the 1950s, along the banks of the Kakhovka Reservoir. It is interesting that in the monographs on land mollusks of the former Soviet Union published later ( Likharev & Rammelmeyer, 1952; Schileyko, 1984), B. cylindrica is mentioned for Ukraine only from Crimea and Odesa. In 1978, B. cylindrica was found in Askania-Nova ( Korniushin, 1986), Kherson Region, along with two more species of land mollusks brought from the Crimea: Oxychilua deilus (Bourguignat, 1857) and Monacha fruticola , see below.

Now B. cylindrica can be considered widespread in the south of Ukraine (Gural-Sverlova, 2018), especially along the coasts of the Black and Azov seas and along the lower reaches of the Dnipro River, northward to Zaporizhzhia ( fig. 1 View Fig ). The northernmost known finds of this species in Ukraine have so far been made in Kyiv ( Vychalkovskaya, 2008) and Rivne (iNaturalist, 2024); outside Ukraine — in Minsk ( Belarus), where this species is recorded locally since the end of 2021 (iNaturalist, 2024).

In western Ukraine, a large population of B. cylindrica was first recorded on the grassy slopes of the stadium of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in 1998 ( Sverlova et al., 2006). Since that time, the species has been found, although in much smaller numbers, at two more sites of Lviv distant from each other and from the stadium. In one of these cases, the snails were found near the city’s main railway station, which may indicate they were brought in by rail. Besides Lviv, B. cylindrica was registered in 2014 in the Podilski Tovtry National Natural Park near the village of Bila, Chemerivtsi District, Khmelnytskyi Region ( Balashov et al., 2018), and in 2022 in Rivne (iNaturalist, 2024).