Dear Enzo

I will try and answer some of your questions

>1) how should a land snail be cleaned?

Mostly the same sorts of methods you might use for cleaning marine things,
just for some species you may have to be a bit more careful but this can
apply to virtually any group of shells as they all have their little tricks
etc.

>2) how should they be handled and stored since they appear to be much
>more fragile than marine conch?

You generally handle and store them the same way you would marine things,
as for the fragile bit well there are plenty of marine things that need to
be handled with care eg some Murexs. So what you do very much depends on
what you have and how you want to display/store them.

>3) some of you said they are easy to find if you know where to look at,
>so where should one normally look at to find them?

The main places to look are under logs, wood and bark on the ground, in
leaf litter, under rocks, on and around limestone (this is especially
good), on trees (not that common) etc. Basically any where that might be
able to provide shelter or food for the snail.

>4) can you quote some literature on landsnails - in italian, english,
>french or spanish - for a beginner?

Some books just off the top of my head include:

General
Compendium of landshells - by R.T. Abbott

Europe in part
The land snails of north west Europe - which has an English and German
version, with the German version the better of the two I think - M.P.
Kerney, RAD Cameron & J.H. Jungbluth.

Japan

Coloured illustrations of the land snails of Japan - M. Azuma - in Japanese

Australia

Field guide to the non-marine molluscs of south eastern Australia - B.J.
Smith and R.C. Kershaw

American

How to know the eastern land snails - J.B. Burch

The last two are out of print. But as you can see there are some books
around. There are more but I can't think of them at the moment. As it is
very late.

Regards

Stephanie





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Stephanie A. Clark

Invertebrate Identification
Unit 4/17 Morris Street
PO Box 418
Summer Hill, NSW 2130
Australia

phone  61 (02) 9799 5689  fax  61 (02) 9799 5610  mobile  0412 372388
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