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The 'Eelgrass limpet', ''Lottia alveus'', was a small marine gastropod which, up until the early 20th century, was apparently quite easy to find in eelgrass beds in many sheltered localities on the northeastern seaboard of North America.
Its range of distribution used to be from Labrador, Canada, as far south as New York. In some places it was considered to be very common, and was collected live on the blades of ''Zostera marina'', a species of seagrass, up until the late 1920s. However, the eelgrass limpet now appears to have become extinct.
The extinction was not caused directly by human interference, rather this small marine snail disappeared from the fauna because of a sudden catastrophic collapse of the populations of the eelgrass plant, which was its sole habitat and food source. In the early 1930s, the seagrass beds all along that part of the coastline were decimated by "Wasting Disease", which was caused by a slime mold.
Some colonies of the seagrass ''Zostera marina'' lived in brackish water, and these areas served as refugia, and thus the ''Zostera'' plants were able to survive the impact of this disease, but the limpet was unable to tolerate anything but seawater, and therefore was not able to live through the crisis.

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REFERENCES

REFERENCES

External links

★ http://biology.mcgill.ca/undergra/c465a/biodiver/2000/eelgrass-limpet/eelgrass-limpet.htm

★ http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/abstract/180/1/72

★ http://www.speciesatrisk.gc.ca/search/speciesDetails_e.cfm?SpeciesID=175