Kurt Auffenberg wrote,
"To tell the truth no one knows about decline of land snails in the eastern
US.  Habitat destruction runs rampant as we all know, but land snails can
hold on to a tenuous existence in small parcels of even non-pristine
conditions.  Obviously, some are more sensitive than others, but they seem
to be holding their own.  There are so few land snail nuts and so much
territory to cover, we simply don't have enough data to make any
predictions, dire or otherwise."

We have a pretty good guide to land snails and their distribution within
Alabama ca. 1910, when the state still had extensive tracts of virgin forest
and pesticides were not widely applied. I have often thought that the
distribution of land snails today would make an excellent indicator of
environmental change since then. Land snails are easy to collect, and for
many (not all) species a dead shell is sufficient for identification. It
would be beneficial for collectors to accumulate information on them,
especially if the collections were labeled carefully with accurate dates and
localities, and with ecologic notes such as "found in oak leaf litter" or
"on limestone". When collecting fossils, I often gather a few dead snail
shells along with the fossils and sort them out later, just so there will be
a museum somewhere with a few snails collected during this decade. But
that's probably just a few of the larger and more conspicuous species.

I never collect ALL the dead shells, since they form a neat little ecologic
niche in themselves and surely some small creatures depend on them for
laying eggs, hiding, resting, etc. And I don't collect the live ones at all,
though this would have to be done for a serious collection.

Is this sort of collecting doing any good, Kurt? At least I'm getting
familiar with the snails' shapes; some are quite elegant. Should private
collectors be encouraged to work on land snails near their homes? It would
certainly save them a lot of dive money.

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama