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Volume 1 in this series reported the scientific results from our survey of the freshwater gastropods of United States Atlantic drainages, Georgia to the New York line. In the preface to that volume, I mentioned that during the 30 years over which the FWGNA Project has developed, I developed the habit of sending regular emails to an expanding list of collaborators, a practice which ultimately evolved into an internet blog. Those emails and blog posts have sometimes contained important supplementary information on the biology of the fascinating organisms toward which the FWGNA Project has been directed, as well as historical background, context, and rationale for various methodological and taxonomic decisions made in Volume 1. Here in Volume 2 we collect 29 essays on the evolutionary biology and systematics of the freshwater pulmonate gastropods, published online between 2004 and 2015. These essays have been edited rather heavily from the form in which they were originally posted, in many cases, and re-ordered into subthemes. Essays 1 - 14 review topics in the Lymnaeidae, essays 16 - 21 the Ancylidae/Planorbidae, and essays 22 - 29 the Physidae, with topics of a more general nature sprinkled throughout. Each essay opens with its date of publication, which is important to notice, because single themes can span multiple years, and my own thoughts have often evolved over time.
About the author
Dr. Robert T. Dillon, Jr. is America's foremost authority on freshwater gastropods. From 1983 until his retirement in 2016 he was Professor of Biology at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He is the author of The Ecology of Freshwater Molluscs (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and over 60 scientific papers on the genetics, evolution, and ecology of snails. A former president of the American Malacological Society, Dr. Dillon wrote the freshwater gastropod chapter for the popular 2006 AMS publication, The Mollusks: A Guide to their Study, Collection and Preservation. In 1998 he founded the Freshwater Gastropods of North America Project, a long-term, collaborative effort to inventory and monograph the entire gastropod fauna inhabiting every river, lake and stream throughout the continent north of Mexico.
