Alien insects represent one of the most species rich groups of organisms introduced to Europe, with some responsible for adverse social-economic, human-health, biodiversity and ecosystem impacts. The impacts of invasive alien species, especially on island ecosystems, have been a hot topic of research worldwide. Cyprus is a Mediterranean island at the biogeographic crossroads of Asia, Africa and Europe. This study presents the database of the alien insects of the island of Cyprus as a whole, created through an extensive review including grey literature and online sources. The Alien to Cyprus Entomofauna (ACE) triples the known number of alien insects and adds supplemental information to existing species. Data concerning a total of 349 alien insects are presented alongside an updated checklist and recommendations for informing management. The status of alien insects on the island, their origin, trophic guilds, establishment, pathways of introduction and impacts are discussed. Developing an alien species inventory for the island is challenging due to its geographic position and the increasing movement of people and goods leading to new species introductions. This publication constitutes an important first step towards providing information for effective actions to tackle invasive alien insects on Cyprus. The checklist and accompanying information can underpin understanding of the status and trends of alien species including providing information for risk assessments. ACE will continue to be maintained and updated as new records for Cyprus are made.

Hydrobioid freshwater gastropods were collected from mainland and insular Greece. Several threatened taxa, such as Graecoanatolica vegorriticola, Pseudamnicola

A new minute valvatiform species belonging to the genus Daphniola Radoman 1973, Daphniola eptalophos sp. n., from mountain Parnassos, Greece is described. The n

Islamia trichoniana Radoman, Pseudoislamia balcanica Radoman and Trichonia trichonica Radoman are local endemics and threatened hydrobiids living in Lake Trichonis, Western Greece. The rough initial description of their reproductive organs (i.e. penis, bursa copulatrix and receptacula seminis) is supplemented with new data. The radulae of I. trichoniana and P. balcanica are described in detail for the first time. New records of the three species are given and preliminary data about their feeding regime are provided.

The introduction of the holobiont concept has triggered scientific interest in depicting the structural and functional diversity of animal microbial symbionts, which has resulted in an unprecedented wealth of such cross-domain biological associations. The steadfast technological progress in nucleic acid-based approaches would cause one to expect that scientific works on the microbial symbionts of animals would be balanced at least for the farmed animals of human interest. For some animals, such as ruminants and a few farmed fish species of financial significance, the scientific wealth of the microbial worlds they host is immense and ever growing. The opposite happens for other animals, such as snails, in both the wild and farmed species. Snails are evolutionary old animals, with complex ecophysiological roles, living in rich microbial habitats such as soil and sediments or water. In order to create a stepping stone for future snail microbiome studies, in this literature review, we combined all the available knowledge to date, as documented in scientific papers, on any microbes associated with healthy and diseased terrestrial and aquatic snail species from natural and farmed populations. We conducted a Boolean search in Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect until June 2024, identifying 137 papers, of which 60 were used for original data on snail bacterial communities in the gastrointestinal tract, hepatopancreas, and feces. We provide a synthesis on how representative this knowledge is towards depicting the possible snail core microbiota, as well as the steps that need to be taken in the immediate future to increase the in-depth and targeted knowledge of the bacterial component in snail holobionts.

Pseudamnicola pieperi, previously known only from Karpathos Island (southeast Aegean Sea), is reported from seven new localities on Karpathos and redescribed and taxonomically circumscribed using morphological, anatomical and mtDNA sequence data. Additionally, two new species of Pseudamnicola are described from Rodos, i.e. P. ianthe and P. ilione. The species from Karpathos and Rodos are differentiated from each other (and from the other Greek and circum Mediterannean congeners having similarly shaped shells and penes) by details of the radula, the nervous system and the female genitalia; they are also genetically divergent relative to those congeners that have been sequenced (mtCOI divergence: 3.6–13.5%).