Ovoteste de Bradybaena similaris (Férussac, 1821) (Mollusca, Xanthonychidae): histologia e produção de gametas

Cristina Vasconcellos Furtado1, MariaCristina de Almeida Bessa, ElisabethChristina Marques Nogueira Castanõn, Maria

Ovotestis of adult specimens of Bradybaena similaris (Férussac, 1821) (Mollusca, Xanthonychidae) have been studied, under the microscope. It has been confirmed that the ovotestis of B. similaris lays in the middle of a loose conjunctive tissue, internally the digestive gland, and is constituted of tubular units, surrounded by fusiform cells, which support the germinative lineage in different maturing stages. The oocytes, which are large cells with a finelygranular cytoplasm and spherical nuclei with evident nucleoli, are located at the basis of the acinar wall, just beneath the male cells which are always luminal. A halo separates the oocyte from the follicular epithelium, whose visibility is variable. The spermatozoa, attached to the Sertoli cells or free in the tubule lumen, arrange themselves in a parallel way and stand out because of the pronounced basophilia of their heads and their long andeosinophilic tails.