Do you have your own collection of snail paraphernalia (snail-phernalia)? Also who are your top three snails and can I have a fun fact about them??
Do shells count? If so, then yes, I have an extensive and ever-growing collection! Photos under the cut.
As for my top three snails… augh, well, there’s one obvious one, and the other two are hard to pick. They are (in no particular order):
Nucella lamellosa | Frilled Dogwinkle
One of my personal favorites. I've done some (class-related, not groundbreaking or publishable) field research on these guys. Their shell morphology is phenotypically plastic. Which is, to say, that it's adaptive in a non-heritable way. The length, sculpture, and thickness of the shell are all influenced by the environment the snail grows up in, and can be used to elucidate what sort of predators they share a habitat with.
Chrysomallon squamiferum | Scaly-foot Snail
Is this one even fair to include here? The scaly-foot snail is just too damn metal. Literally! The outer layer of its shell, and the hard, scaly protrusions on its foot, are composed of iron sulfides. They live around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. They have proportionally massive hearts and gills in order to cope with the low-oxygen environment - their heart takes up about 4% of their body volume, while the ctenidium (gill) accounts for 15.5% (source).
Opisthostoma vermiculum | Small Worm Opisthostoma
These snails have four discernible coiling axes - the most of any gastropod! (That we know of.) Why? We aren't sure. The small worm opisthostoma is, as the name suggests, quite diminutive, with a shell less than two millimeters (~0.08 inches) high. That, and their restriction to limestone karsts - which are under threat from quarrying - make further research difficult.
A selection of favorites I keep under my primary PC monitor. It’s mostly Clanculus sp.
A small cluster of Chicoreus sp. amongst my gemstone display. The rock at the front of the tray is a fossilized bivalve. The center and leftmost shells are all the same species - C. brunneus, the burnt murex.
Some of my personal favorites on the right. Angaria sp., along with Umbonium sp., all fluoresce bright pink under UV. Why? No idea, but I’d love to find out! The left side is mostly scallops (Pectinidae sp.) as well as a queen conch (Aliger gigas) and a Spondylus sp.
More scallops, as well as a good chunk of my olives (Olividae sp.). They’re one of my favorite gastropod families - can you tell?
(The art in the background, btw, is mine! I drew it for an assignment in a class on Native American storytelling. It’s based on the story, “The Seal-Hunting Brothers,” as transcribed in the book Haboo: Native American Stories from Puget Sound, by Vi Hilbert.)
Another assortment - this one consists of conches (Strombidae sp.) and abalone (Haliotis sp.).
Where the rest of my properly stored shells live. I am perpetually in need of more boxes.
The Isle of Misfit Toys, AKA shells which are too large for a box and which I wasn’t able to integrate into a display somewhere.
The basket of shells without boxes. I recently got another batch of boxes, which means at some point I’m going to have to pick through through them, figure out which ones fit into what, cut out foam inlays to cushion them, and get everything to sit nicely. Lots of busywork!
My giant bag full of Nucella sp., because I’ve become so associated with them amidst the shell club members that they keep giving them to me for free.
A shoebox full of bivalves (and also a limpet).
Some repurposed crafts containers. The multi-chamber one is full of Conus sp.
Lastly… miscellaneous storage. The only non-mollusc in the whole collection is in the upper left cell of the first photo. It’s a brachiopod! I found it myself a couple years ago while out tidepooling for my birthday. It’s shockingly intact; the hinge is still completely articulated.
Do you have to deal with a lot of eggs when keeping snails?
Nope, at least not yet! I’m actually hoping they’ll lay eggs eventually… I’m not sure what it is I’m doing wrong that’s making them disinclined to reproduce.
When I kept other gastropods in the tank along with C. nemoralis (those being small local snails/slugs, predominantly Oxychilus sp. and what I think are garden arions or the like) I did have to deal with eggs! The reason I stopped keeping everything except C. nemoralis was actually because I wanted to know for certain if the eggs I was finding were theirs or not.
Here’s a few pics from when I viewed the eggs under a microscope! They were compressed gently between a cover slip and a depression slide, which is why there’s a transparent round region in the middle of each egg. Without the cover slip, they were too three-dimensional to bring into focus, much less see what was going on inside!
