More snail musings

It seems that snails are my latest Thing. I hope you feel enamoured with your own choice of flora or fauna. I do hope you've found something that sparks your interest.

I've been scrabbling about in the flowerbeds again and I'm pretty confident that I've found Trochulus striolatus, the Strawberry snail.

Photo from AnimalBase, taken by Welter Schultes.

The shells are hairy when young... did you know that snail shells could be hairy? This paper suggests it's an adaptation that helps the animals cling to food plants in wet conditions when they could otherwise fall off (which would require a tiring climb back up again, that a small and hungry snail could do without). Who knows.

Also I think I have a Oxychilus draparnaudi or Draparnaud's glass snail. You can see how the last whorl gets bigger much more quickly than that of the strawberry snail. Monsieur Draparnaud was the snail man in France in the late 18th century.

also taken by Welter Schultes.

There are several more I found, but I won't go on. Suffice to say I still think it's a good choice for a collection. Though this evening when I went through the specimens one of them was really stinky.  I poured boiling water over them but it just made a sort of stinky broth. I don't remember Mr Adams mentioning stinky snails, it did put me off a bit.

Perhaps this points at the need to use fresh (alive) snails and kill them. This seems a bit mean when there are lots of empty shells around. All the shells I've collected so far have been empty, and I know it's possible to identify lots of species from these. But some identifications rely on the colour of the snail's body, or the glossiness that only a fresh shell has. Besides, at the moment it's rather early in the season to see any live snails at all. So I'm going to keep going as I am, and then at least I'll have some tentatively named empty specimens to compare with live ones later on.

I was watching Ray Mears this evening and he was talking about how marine molluscs were a popular snack for people in this country thousands of years ago. He sat in a Scottish rock shelter looking out at the rain, in a spot where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had sat and chewed on their shellfish - a huge midden of shells had accumulated in front of it. The woman who had excavated the site showed him some of the limpets she'd unearthed - they were 9000 years old but didn't look particularly worn. It made me reflect that where you find a shell isn't necessarily an indication of where the species lives today. Found empty shells are ok as a way to practise your identification skills but they're not really a current biological record. Perhaps this distinction should be noted on a specimen's label.

A shell midden being eroded by the River Ythan near Aberdeen. Photo by Martyn Gorman.

On the other hand, environmental archaeologists (specifically, palaeomalacologists) are pleased to find ancient shells, because it helps them infer what an environment was like in the past. Archaeological reports often have a section on snails as the species present will suggest whether a location was wood or meadow, damp or dry, and perhaps so shed light on the lifestyle of the local people.