Aspects on the Diversity of the Fresh-Water Fauna

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Abstract
Organisms in fresh water are divisible into three ecological categories: 1) those that are hololimnic, which live their entire lives in the water; 2) those that are merolimnic (most aquatic insects, fish that migrate to the sea, etc.), which spend only part of their life in fresh water and then leave this habitat; and 3) those that are endoparasites and that occur free in fresh water only for a limited part of their life. Because of their relative independence of the fresh water habitat, the last two categories are affected less by the discontinuity in time and space, and by the insular nature of bodies of fresh water. Because the physical environmental factors are more extreme and fluctuate more as latitude is increased, one would expect fewer species of hololimnic animals as one progresses north or south from the equator. This theory holds for bassomatophoran gastropods, but not for hololimnic fishes, which is easily explained by the different mode of dispersal of this group.

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