Michal Minas commented on a previous post (# 121) with a link to this picture of a Drymaeus species, taken at Uxmal, Yucat??n, Mexico. It is probably D. serperastrus (Say, 1830).
Monthly Archives: May 2011
New paper
Today a new paper was published. It is entitled “Annotated type catalogue of the Orthalicoidea (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the Royal Belgian Institute of Sciences, Brussels, with descriptions of two new species”, and was published in Issue 101 of ZooKeys. URL: http://bit.ly/k6UBuR doi: 10.3897/zookeys.101.1133
A break
Away for a break, back beginning of June.
A garden as laboratory
Wonderful to have your own backyard as laboratory. Gerard van Buurt’s garden acts as one, now he recently transplanted there some specimens of Drymaeus elongatus.
Metrics
For those people who love metrics (and there are definitely more metrics lovers now than e.g. 30 years ago), there is a website who provides an interactive graphical interface of all names published in Zoological Record (http://bit.ly/iVILER). You can choose to display new (sub)species named in any specific year, up to higher taxa, while at the same time you can choose on the left-hand side in the screen any taxonomic group down to superfamily level.
Apparently 1975 and 2010 have been very productive years in malacology, in this case for the Stylommatophora.But, hey… let me check something I have some knowledge of. Selecting the Orthalicoidea as group to display, the number of new taxa in 1975 still is very high. And I can assure you, it wasn’t me who is behind this number… Actually, I don’t think it was a remarkably productive year for Orthalicoid papers either. Perhaps it is linked to the definition of Orthalicoidea, which admittedly have changed a bit (and probably will do so in the years to come)… Anyway, I have no clue where these 329 new (sub)species come from.
Fieldwork Peru (8)
Marjan van Hulsel is back from Peru and spent two days in Leiden to discuss her observations.
Snail food
A recent mail thread with Gerard van Buurt set me on the track of the food of snails. Particularly, Gerard was wondering what Drymaeus elongatus might be eating, observing it on the stems of Guaiacum officinale in his garden in Willemstad, Cura??ao. Since on these stems no fungi or lichens are visible – known as snail food – we tried to find any literature reference to Orthalicoid snail food based on field observations.