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A call for standardised snail ecological studies to support schistosomiasis risk assessment and snail control efforts

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Abstract

Freshwater snails act as intermediate hosts (IH) for schistosomiasis, a tropical disease affecting over 200 million people worldwide. Despite their medical importance, an extensive understanding of IH snail ecology remains absent. Especially data on the tolerance limits to different abiotic factors are fragmented and incomplete. Consequently, the construction of accurate species distribution models to identify snail habitats and guide targeted snail control efforts remains difficult. Here, we compiled a summary on the tolerance limits to abiotic factors of African IH snails of human schistosomiasis. A systematic search on Web of Science, PubMed, and Embase identified 45 relevant studies. Synthesis of these studies indicates that research efforts differ greatly between IH snail species, life stages, and abiotic factors. The importance of each abiotic factor in determining snail presence and abundance is discussed. Furthermore, attention was drawn to knowledge gaps and the lack of standardised experimental designs, which impedes comparisons between studies. This in turn prevents us from making firm conclusions and calls for best practices adopted by all malacologists. In doing so, IH snail ecological data could serve as a basis to assess schistosomiasis risk and guide snail control efforts in order to support schistosomiasis control.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the biomedical reference librarians of the KU Leuven Libraries—2Bergen—learning Centre Désiré Collen (Leuven, Belgium) for their help in conducting the systematic literature search. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Funding

Tim Maes and Cyril Hammoud both benefited from an FWO fellowship Grant (Ref. 1S86319N and 11C5219N, respectively) of the Research Foundation—Flanders.

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  1. Laboratory of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Genomics, Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Ch. Deberiotstraat 32, 3000, Louvain, Belgium

    Tim Maes & Filip A. M. Volckaert

  2. Department of Biology, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Leuvensesteenweg 13, 3080, Tervuren, Belgium

    Tim Maes, Cyril Hammoud & Tine Huyse

  3. Limnology Unit, Department of Biology, Ghent University, K.L. Ledeganckstraat 35, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Cyril Hammoud

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. The systematic search was designed and carried out by T.M. Screening of the literature and data collection were carried out by T.M. and C.H. The first draft of the manuscript was written by T.M. and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Maes, T., Hammoud, C., Volckaert, F.A.M. et al. A call for standardised snail ecological studies to support schistosomiasis risk assessment and snail control efforts. Hydrobiologia 848, 1773–1793 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-021-04547-4

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